EMERGENCY SHOWERS are common in school labs, but lack of safety training in academia has contributed to the death of at least one lab worker, who failed to reach a shower to douse her flames.
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The day Sheharbano “Sheri” Sangji, a 23-year-old technician at the University of California, Los Angeles, undertook what would be her last task, she wore a sweatshirt and no lab coat. That late December afternoon in 2008, she started working with a liquid called t-butyl lithium. The chemical requires careful handling, because as a pyrophoric, it catches fire when exposed to air. But equipment malfunctioned, and the fluid spilled, setting the synthetic fibers of her clothing ablaze. Two postdocs ran to help douse the fire engulfing Sangji, but they failed to get her to the nearby shower. Emergency personnel raced to the scene, but they arrived too late. She spent 18 days in a hospital burn unit before she died.
Sangji’s catastrophe highlights widely unsuspected risks in many schools. “Most academic laboratories are unsafe venues for work or study,” wrote safety expert Neal Langerman in the May/June 2009 Journal of Chemical Health and Safety. He termed the fatality “totally and unquestionably preventable.” Both Patrick Harran, a chemist and director of the U.C.L.A. lab where Sangji worked, and Chancellor Gene Block independently described Sangji’s case as a “tragic accident.” “As we continue to mourn Sheri’s death and grieve for her family, we are determined to rededicate ourselves to ensuring the safety of each and every member of our entire Bruin family,” Block said in a statement. U.C.L.A. and other universities instituted reforms and reportedly reviewed their safety procedures.
To the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA), however, the incident was not a mere misfortune. Cal/OSHA uncovered life-threatening safety violations, including lack of proper training and protective clothing. It also found that U.C.L.A. failed to make a required report of a similar, but nonfatal incident with another student more than a year before Sangji’s. Had reforms happened after that event, Sangji’s fate might have been different. Cal/OSHA imposed nearly $32,000 in fines (uncontested by U.C.L.A.) in her death.
No hard numbers exist on how often such incidents occur in labs because no one tracks them as a distinct category. The American Chemical Society’s Division of Chemical Health and Safety is working to get “reliable data,” Langerman says. But surveys find incidents to be much more common in academic settings than in industrial labs, says James Kaufman, president of the Laboratory Safety Institute in Natick, Mass. Since 1997 the toll includes deaths of a Cleveland State University professor by electrocution, a Dartmouth College professor by exposure to a lethal chemical and a University of Chicago professor who was probably infected by a fatal pathogen. Most recently, this past January, an explosion in a chemistry lab at Texas Tech University critically injured a graduate student.
Soon afterward, John S. Bresland, who chairs the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, a federal investigative agency, announced the board would send a team to Texas Tech for its first investigation of an academic lab and would begin systematically studying campus incidents. Texas Tech vice president of research Taylor Eighmy said in a statement that the university supported the investigation: “We have an excellent program in place, yet we believe this incident affords us an opportunity to proactively look at our safety training.”
The problem of school lab danger lies in management responsibility, Langerman says. Often in industry an “annual performance review of a supervisor has a line item on safety,” he explains, so serious mishaps jeopardize careers. Many academic institutions, Kaufman adds, show “a disregard that runs from the top of the organization to the bottom,” and safety failures rarely damage powerful professorial careers involving large grants. “Do funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation look at the safety and environmental record of the [principal investigator] before they award funding?” Langerman asks. “Do promotion committees look at these things? The answer is no.” In addition, occupational safety laws cover employees but not students, and federal standards exempt state workers such as Sangji.
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16 Comments
Add CommentThe tone and subject matter of the article suggest that this is a problem only in more advanced research labs. This is far from the truth. I recall a high school student who decided he would prepare some nitroglycerine and mixed up the components. An explosion resulted, killing another student, unfortuneately not the individual who did the mixing. A common undergraduate organic experiment used to be the preparation of nitrobenzene by mixing a nitrating mixture with benzene in a seperatory funnel and shaking it. An undergraduate mistakenly substituted methanol for benzene and when he started shaking it exploded, killing him.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll labs are dangerous by there nature. If all protocols and safety equipment are applied this can be mitigated but never fully eliminated. As in all industry's. Wear your gear, Ask if unsure confer with a peer, read the MSDS and understand its consequences before beginning procedures.You should be ok.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust be Glad your not working in the third world mix carcinogens in a vat with your bare hands to make cheap cotton T-shirts or using mercury to get a miniscule trace of gold to feed your children.
Is it really true that work in the chemical industry is done under conditions that are more safe for the workers and for the environment? Exploding oil rigs and cars with involuntary acceleration come to mind. Accidents are part of activities, they are not planned or desired, but they do happen. More rules will not help.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPersonally, I believe that we are at a point where the rules make lawyers happy but also make the rest of us less safe!
yes it is high risk working at the lab expecially with bunsen burner (we have approximately 8 bunsen burner each has 1000 celcious,so = 8000 celcious ), and our students as teens love playing without cover and i always asking them( with passion) to be more carefully at the lab.Talking about hazard ,chemicals accident and their effect for kids must be in the curriculum also.So the lab tech can do work more safer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne of our jobs as educators in to reduce the risk so that the benefits (for example, of using a Bunsen Burner) out weigh the risks. We need to have rules in writing that are enforced and that have consequences.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOur inquiries into accidents at The Laboratory Safety Institues (LSI, www.labsafetyinstitute.org) has consistantly shown that the accident frequency rate in academia (schools and colleges and universities) is 10-50 times greater than in the chemical industry.
Having worked as an expert witness in cases where students were badly injured, I never met an attorney that was made happy by the rules. They did their best to represent their client in an adversarialy system where defendents simply do not want to apologize to the injured student (and properly compensate the the student) for the defendents egregious errors.
Doctor Frank is very right. This is not just a problem for research. LSI has a publication (85 Years of Progress) that summarizes some of the worst accidents in lab over the past 85 years. If you or Doctor Frank would like to share a summary of a lab fatality with LSI, we will be happy to give an electronic copy of our publication.
No institution is going to have the safety culture they need to make serious accident less likely until they embrace the concept the "working safely must be a condition of employment". Senior administrators need to provide "Leadership In Safety". LSI teaches them how. The dog sled can't go any faster than the lead dog.
Jim Kaufman, LSI, jim@labsafety.org
"An explosion resulted, killing another student, unfortuneately not the individual who did the mixing."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStrange phraseology. Are you suggesting it would have been fortunate if it had killed the individual who did the mixing?
What they are saying is, it is more tragic that an innocent bystander was killed, rather than the fool who mixed up the explosive concoction. Not that either is "fortunate", but it is more of a tragedy that someone who had nothing to do with the explosion was killed rather than the person responsible for it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm not sure about that. The initial phrase, "An explosion resulted, killing another student," pretty much covers the description and situation part. The, "unfortuneately not the individual who did the mixing," clearly suggests, at the least, that it was 'unfortunate' the individual doing the mixing was not the one killed as a result. It is not much of a stretch of logical simplification to reduce the phrase to, 'it would have been fortunate if the individual doing the mixing was the one killed.' I'm sure that most would agree that anyone being killed as a result of ignorance or recklesness is unfortunate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIndeed, being accidentally killed is unfortunate in any circumstance. However it is MORE unfortunate for someone to die because of another person's error, than the person committing the error dying because of their own actions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe point is, accountability, owning your own actions. No one wants anyone to die. But if someone did die, and they did, better that the fool that caused the explosion in the first place die than someone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of the fool who caused the explosion die as a result of another person's foolishness.
To make another example, say someone foolishly ignites a huge pile of fireworks. Which would be worse? The person doing the igniting dying, or some person across the street, minding their own business being killed in a deluge of flames, while the guy who lighted them off escapes unscathed. It would be best if no one died. But if someone is going to die, better the person whose foolish actions caused a lethal situation, than someone who had nothing to do with it.
Another example. I personally knew a young attractive girl who was almost killed in a car crash, caused by a foolish old man who crossed into her lane, and crashed into her car. The young lady escaped unscathed. The old man died. My reaction was, "better him than her" because 1) the old man caused the crash, and 2) better an old man who has lived his life die than a vibrant young woman who has most of her life ahead of her.
Own your own actions. Just like these murderers that go on a killing spree, then they turn the gun on themselves. Yes, it would be best if no one was killed at all. But it would be "less worse" if the killer just turned the gun on themselves to start with and spared everyone else.
A new trend in academic labs to to decrease the hood face velocity to save money/energy costs. OSHA standards (set by Congress) are very low. I feel that these green lab buildings are health hazards.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgreed, but one plays in a poor karmic arena making any sort of deserved/undeserved judgements. Better to just express sympathy for all when it is after the fact. I just groused at the author's use of the word 'unfortunate' referring to the non-injury of the fatailty-causing mixer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWho deserves to die aside, I find it interesting that no one seems to have lost their job. It seems reasonable that lax safety protocols correlates with lower quality science as they both require discipline and attention to detail. Without direct consequence and accountability, as likely exists in industry, no one is going to change anything. If some new laws are passed I hope they have teeth, because not just safety is at stake; quality science is as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I personally knew a young attractive girl who was almost killed in a car crash, caused by a foolish old man who crossed into her lane, and crashed into her car." And also, as we all know, any death is much more unfortunate if an attractive person is killed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisall one has to do is look at B.P.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe plant in Texas City, Texas should be shut down by OSHA et al, but no way $
how many will they be allowed to murder ?
how many have they murdered now, and how many will die in the future from the 40 day and 40 night release of dangerous toxins ;
BP: 500,000 pounds of emissions released By T.J. Aulds The Daily News Published June 5, 2010
TEXAS CITY At BPs Texas City refinery, more than 400 pounds a day of benzene 40 times the state reportable levels was released during a 40-day period while a subunit of the refinerys ultracracker unit was offline, according to a company filing with the states environmental agency Friday.
In all, BP officials said more than 500,000 pounds of pollutants and nonpollutants were released while the company increased flaring as they tried to repair a compressor on the faulty unit.
http://galvestondailynews.com/story/157738/
http://seabreezenews.com/back%20issues/1007-July_2010/Page_01c.pdf
http://seabreezenews.com/back%20issues/1008-August_2010/Page_01c.pdf
it's dangerous enough in college labs doing simple experiments, especially a new experiment each week to learn. I recall myself adding too much too fast of the required amount of liquid to my test tube product, and suddenly it started fuming like it could blow up and getting really hot and the liquid started rising up out of the test tube. I turned on the cold tap water to cool the outside of the glass off, desperately hoping to save my experiment and put out the fire. but the experiment was ruined and had to be repeated when it was almost finished.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a very scary story. I do agree that most labs have become a very risky place to work. They either pose some kind of health or safety issue. I mean even in high school labs there is still asbestos being used. That is a terrible risk for children to encounter. There is more information <a href="http://www.banasbestosnow.com/blog/2012/01/27/asbestos-science-kits?utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=BAN&utm_content=SchoolSafety">here</a>. I think it is pretty terrible stuff going on.
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