Chemistry has OSHA because of stuff like this

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For those not aware, that first story implies he had to wait five days in a general ward in the hospital before he could get into a burn ward with the doctors and equipment to properly treat his burns at a high level - not that they waited five days to seek help because it was just too far away.

"a solid 20kg of potassium" "waist deep water" I'm going deaf just reading that. Imagine the bang that would make 😮

You know it's a special episode when the guy who got his hand covered in molten white phosphorus doesn't earn the yikes award.

A little info was left out that i am just now realizing. I didn't wait 5 days to go to the hospital. I went to the hospital immediately after it happened. But the hospital here does not have its own burn ward. So I was forced to make an appointment with them and 5 days later was the earliest they could get me in. I sought help immediately after it happened. I just know that it doesn't read like that from the messages. I was in the hospital for what felt like an eternity waiting for the burn ward appointment. The burn ward appointment was absolutely the most painful thing I've ever been through in my entire life and if you know my life, that's surprising. If anyone has any questions, feel free to reply to this comment and I will answer them as I find time to do so. And yes, I know I'm a total idiot. That's been established already, but this was years ago and I am much wiser now and we now do things very, very differently in my lab/business. We now have employees to worry about, quarterly inspections from the FBI and DEA, a reputation as a trustworthy chemical and elements supplier to worry about, etc. No need to remind me of my stupidity when I was younger and more ignorant than I am today..

My story is pretty simple comparatively: I was moving a crucible of molten bronze and the crucible failed (I suspect an air bubble, as the crucible had been dried for 4 hours in a 300c oven just the previous day.) The crucible broke right where my tongs were holding it and ~3kg of bronze splashed all over as the rest of the crucible shattered when it hit the brick floor. I was splashed with molten bronze from my shoulder to my shoes. All the natural fibers in my clothing were unblemished. All the artificial ones melted. . . into the natural fiber clothing beneath. My shoes were destroyed but my wool socks were utterly unscathed. Anywhoo, I jumped back the instant I dropped the Crucible and immediately doused the area with my safety bucket. This was the last time I wore sneakers while moving molten metal. I managed to escape without a single burn though I got a nice case of the Adrenalin shakes. Fortunately my working area was devoid of any tripping hazards (I choreograph my movements VERY VERY carefully when moving molten metal, so I'm very cognizant to remove any hazards in the area, an path of emergency egress.) I will say, molten bronze is a great way to clean aged brickwork. When I peeled off the layer of spilled bronze, the brick underneath looked brand new, and the grout was the cleanest I've ever seen it!

the thing about OSHA that a lot of people miss is that its mostly about what your employer can or can't make you do. i was always crazy about safety and PPE with my guys because i didn't want them to get hurt, but also because i wanted to cover myself if they did get hurt. basically, i made it so that if one of my guys got hurt then it was either a freak accident or he was being negligent. and some people just think they are immortal and will not only shake hands with danger, but tickle its taint too. and some of those people never do get hurt despite all the dangerous taint tickles!

This isn't chemistry related but I made a mistake that cost more than my salary when I was an apprentice machinist at a factory. I accidentally destroyed a massive press die by continuing to operate the press while my mentor was away despite the bottom being slightly misaligned. If I remember correctly the tool and die engineer said it would probably cost the company ~$100k to replace. I made ~$25k. Fortunately it was taken as a learning opportunity and I wasn't disciplined.

I once got conc. Sulphuric acid on my hand. I was expecting itching or irritation, but it felt like someone was torching my skin like it was a creme brulee. Luckily I got the tap running and ran my hand under it, no lasting effects but it discoloured my skin and nails. I cannot imagine the pure agony of getting White Phosphorus on my hands like that guy. WTF.

RE kitty litter: those blue flecks are, or at least used to be, cobalt chloride, serving as a moisture indicator. You won't get rid of them with organic solvents.

Your story of the leaking waste barrel reminded me of one of my old workplaces. I was working as an electronics engineer in a workshop at a university, helping the scientists maintain their equipment aswell as fabricating custom equipment to their needs. Anywas we had the need to upgrade our workshop and got it completely rebuilt, everything from ESD flooring to custom made furniture and so on. One day the principal of the university showed some other higher ups around, including some goverment officials. The principal also wanted to show our almost completed new workshop, so while me and my colleagues were in the workshop, talking with some of the electricians about some minor changes, the principal along with a small group of other people, suddenly showed up in our workshop. We were a bit startled but greeted them and talked abit bout our ideas for the new workshop and so on. Shortly after the maintenance director of the uni, wanted to show our new mains switchboard that had just been installed, so he called the chief electrician over to demonstrate it. The chief electrician turned on the main breaker and an ear deffening loud bang sounded from the room next door (which was our storage room for the workshop), out from that room came an apprentice of the electrician, who was in the middle of installing some three phase outlets when the chief electrician turned on the main breaker, having forgotten all about his apprentice working. That poor apprentice was white as a sheet and still held, shakingly, onto a pair of halfmolten cutting pliers. The looks on everybodys face were priceless. Fortunately the apprentice didn't endure any enjuries except for perhaps on his mental wellbeing.

Oh, this is a fun game I can participate in! Not a chemist, but a biomedical story. During my bachelor, I was working in a lab on some bacterial spores (cool fellas, but not important) with 8 other students, a few PhD students working/baby sitting us and our lab tech. All of a sudden we all heard a muffled boom, the sound of glass breaking and then the door of our incubator being flung open by a 40L flood of the foulest smelling… anything I have ever encountered, shards of glass of all sizes and everyone’s petri dishes. Turns out, some genius from another lab had gotten permission to run an experiment in our incubator where he filled a 120L glass vat with 40 L of his culture to accumulate the gasses for over a week and had left to go on vacation. The problem was that he did this without a pressure release valve, so it had turned into a pressure bomb and went off. The scary part, apart from the cleanup, was that my partner had pulled some petri dishes out of that incubator 3 minutes before it went off. If he had timed that a bit worse, he might have gotten hit by that. Or it might have gone off at night and damaged electronics, etc. The good news is that we could all hear our lab tech chews this guy out, it was not pretty but well deserved. That explosion destroyed about 12 weeks of PhD student and 20 weeks of bachelor student work, which was not fun.

So...can I use your grill in the back of your van if no selenium is involved? Asking for a friend...

Re: HF. If you're using concentrated stuff, if you're not going to wear at least double gloves - with one of those layers being proper rubber gloves - don't go near HF. I recommend a third layer of latex gloves on top of your nitriles because they react (safely) rapidly with HF (turning brown) so you'll know immediately when to change the outer layer. Also, I've definitely pulled HF fumes through a vacuum pump before. Some fluorinated compounds decompose partially when you're distilling them and you can see the fumes coming off. We had a special dist setup (that was etched a lot) for these distillations. That vacuum pump suffered greatly, I pulled so much chlorine through it.

Before finding your channel, I pictured professional chemists as... well, professional 😁 I mean smart perfectionists in lab coats and glasses. Now I know, that they are the same as the rest of us, reckless apes with oversized brains. Thinking about it now, I was the same when I was in my chemistry phase in mid school. You know, lighting up calcium carbide in puddles, throwing bottles with it near fire, taking lead grids from car batteries without gloves to melt them, mixing ammonia nitrate with sodium hypochlorite in my living room (yikes). Thank god I never got access to anything more serious during those times 😅

A Chem story from a different perspective: I am a cancer survivor who went through chemotherapy as a secondary treatment post surgery. For younger chemo patients (I was 24 at the time) common practice is to surgically install a port just above the left pectoral muscle as the access for your IV meds. Now, the port sits above the muscle, and connects via catheter to your vena cava. This usually spares your veins from the cytotoxic effects of your medication, and can prevent neuropathy in the hands. I had a pretty normal but potent schedule of drugs (Cisplatin, Etoposide Phosphate, and Bleomycin) and after finishing treatment, have an entire patch of my left pec area stained a kind of Jaundiced yellow color, likely from some slight leakage of the port. Moral of the story, check your seals.

Hell yeah, a new Chempilation. I’ve been binging old episodes I’ve already seen, so it’s awesome to have a new one!

Non-Chemistry Safety Equipment Story --- I was taking a fiberoptics class in the Army. At the time, pretty much all fiber connectors were done by hand and required a fair bit of fiddly work. That morning we had gone over all of the safety equipment you should have for working with fiber. Including a special set of tweezers for removing the thin/fragile glass fiber from flesh should you spike yourself. Since you really don't want it to shatter inside of you. Fast forward a few hours. We are all stripping the ends of fiber cables to get to the inner glass core. That core is surrounded by a bunch of loose fine synthetic protective fibers you need to trim away. Easiest way to separate those from the core so you can trim them is to blow at the end of the cable. Fibers spread away and the glass core stays put. One student in our class points the end of the cable at his mouth (instead of blowing at it from the side), tilts his head way back for a deep breath, and then jerks his head forwards to produce a mighty (and unnecessary) puff of air. Succeeding in spiking himself in the lip with the human hair thickness glass. Can you guess what safety equipment we didn't have on hand? Thankfully, these special tweezers are commonplace in hospitals. Though he had to keep his lip/mouth still until we could drive him from on-base to the local hospital in town. So glad I was in that class and not the next since I'm sure the safety briefing got CONSIDERABLY longer ...

Would love to tell you about my first Bio lab job. That place was a mess I worked in food saftey. So most of our workplace hazards were very common. Worst I’ve experienced was a few E-Coli contamination I dealt with. Although the worst hazard wasn’t what I dealt with, but was my other lab workers. We couldn’t consistently get people to clean. There was food stains on everything, but worst was the biohazard room We typically use rough morphology to ID contaminated samples (to help dial in why they might have been, if it was filler error, or system sterilization errors) Basic gram staining was more than enough like 70% of the time. But occasionally we’d have spore staining we’d need to do. That uses Malachite Green. Since a previous accident 2 Years before I got there, our fume hood was destroyed. But we have a biological saftey cabinet. Tech there just assumed they functioned identical, right? So when I got there and learned we were basically evaporating malicite green with no respiratory protection. I started causing a huge stink. There would also be green stains on everything. Since that malichite was the only green thing we had in the lab, I was horrified to clean a random surface and see my paper towels mysteriously turn green. The worse contender was the fact our DI water sink (only one in the facility) had odd green staining in the tubes coming from it. I’m guessing a pervious tech probably washed something covered in it, and let it get into the piping. Who knows how containited all the DI was there. I also heard how my (now previous) supervisor spilled half a bottle on his arm and just wiped it off. And carried on. No incident report. Nothing. Didn’t even use the Shower. Probably rinsed it off in the sink. Pretty sure I’m like 1/4 people who heard that story. We couldn’t consistently do it there in a safe way so we have to pay an outside lab to do it. I refused to even learn. Not under those conditions and with those techs as my teachers. God I’m glad I’m out of there

This is not my story, but something that happened a good while ago in my uni. Still insane. Back in the day, in lab classes for the 1st years people would just throw into the sink all of the liquid waste, since the freshmen didn't work with organic solvents or metals (save for Cu). They advised, of course, to let the faucet running a good while when doing so to dilute the waste so it didin't react in the plumbing. Turns out 18yo fresh faces often don't hear things, and ended up throwing stuff without diluting enough. One day, because of whatever unholy concotion brew in those sewers, the pipes started spewing fire into several of the ground floor labs simultaneously for nearly a minute. Unsurprisingly, after that incident, they started using the proper waste containers for EVERYTHING. The problem is that, because of the really screwed up way that the building was built, it's nigh impossible to replace the underground pipes without pretty much halting the whole class labs for at least a year, which is unfeasable. So, as far as we know, those pipes can be cracked and leaking the wastewater into the soil, and we wouldn't know. However, the floor in the hall is slightly bumpier in the middle.