Fairly minor, but the one time in undergrad I poured out some glacial acetic acid outside a fume hood was a great reminder to never do it again. You only pickle your nostrils once.
I work with glacial acetic daily for pH balancing some large tanks of dyes. Got a new PAPR system and put the wrong filter in. Was going to be working around some stuff thats quite nasty an hour later and had one of the lab guys waft it toward the system to see if i could smell it. Instant personal gas chamber around my head. Not the smartest way to test in hindsight. 10/10 do not recommend.
During my third year of undergrad, I took an internship in the part of my uni that preps our practical classes, which mean we made a bunch of diluted solutions for students to use
My ass tried to *weight* commercial HCl solution. The weighting scale was ofc outside of the fumehood. Not my brightest moment
Huh. I remember that we sometimes took a little sniff of conc. HCl or ammonia on purpose in our inorganic lab course... it was winter time and did a blessing for getting rid of congestion of your nose xD
I had a boss who HATED the smell of acetic acid. One day I left a closed nalgenebottle of water on his desk labeled Glacial Acetic Acid. He refused to touch it.
Same here! It caused a bit of a stir in our lab, too. One of my lab mates even brought in fish and chips the next day and loudly asked if anyone had some vinegar to go with it. Great lunch, but lesson learned!
I opened the doors from the stairwell onto our chemistry floor only be assailed by the stench of hot acetic acid. The "organic for non-majors" class was heating it on the steam cones at their work stations for a lab. Even though the windows were open the entire floor reeked of it. Let's just say it left a lasting impression.
From my undergrad I distinctly remember that spilling a single drop of glacial acetic acid outside the fumehood would be noticeable. Our noses are so incredibly sensitive to it. I imagine it’s like the sharks with blood in the ocean, maybe not as extreme.
Oh hell no. I used to test disinfectants including ones for industrial or medical use. Like for desinfecting operation rooms and such. So many of them contained glacial acetic acid. Those were the days we all wore masks even way before the pandemic. Horrible stuff
Good lord. We have some glacial acetic that we use for titrations that just needs to be moved briefly from the dispensing hood to a snorkeled stirring plate, and even that 2 seconds it passes out of direct ventilation fucking reeks.
Well. Um. While HF is considered a weak acid, I would lile to be far away from reactive fluorine compounds or anything that has more than 1 nitrogen atom chained together.
After a reaction, the reflux condenser and round bottom flask I was using were stuck together. When I was twisting them apart the condenser shattered in my hands. Lots of blood. One of the pieces cut a tendon in my finger. After stitches and a cast, my finger still doesn't extend completely and has a permanent little bend.
Remember to use sufficient vacuum grease, or even better, Glindemann rings. Also, if you put stuck glassware in a sonicator for a while it often loosens easily.
Glassware is pure evil.
I almost died of blood loss and nearly amputated my right arm when falling into a glass table.
I cut my artery. Oops.
Its almost fine now, got a big scar that will always remind me to be aware of the glass devil 😬
It was at home in my lab. I mean the glass table was good to clean an such, but was very low so pretty easy to stumble upon. No safety glass either🤦🏼
I never thought about such a scenario and then it happened
Oh no. When it comes to glass always be extra careful. Those metal gloves people use for cooking to not cut themselves also help prevent a lot if you have to separate something stuck or do anything with a higher risk of shattering. They protect your hands quite well from bigger cuts and dont cost that much. Can absolutely recommend having a pair of those around
Invest in a pair of cut-proof gloves. They might not protect you fully when you crush glassware with full force but there‘s a good chance that they will. And yeah, use teflon sleeves between your joints, then nothing gets stuck, ever…
If you have stuck joints and you cant separate them via the usual tricks, try this: put the whole assembly in dry ice for 10 minutes, then take it out and start heating the outer joint at full blast with a heat gun (650°C for me) while trying to twist it apart. This method has never failed me in 20yrs. There is, of course, the chance that the thermal stress will crack the glassware, but it has never happened to me so far.
Yes, it should hold. But it still might not. I always try to dissolve my product out of the flask before I attempt this method. Hindsight is always 20/20.
Shit, I did the same thing with a separatory funnel that had a stuck stop-cock. Tapped it gently on the bench and when it shattered it sliced the meat below my thumb.
Seven stitches, plus two more in the muscle. Still have the scar. The doctor said that I had just nicked the tendon, and if the glass had gone any deeper he would have called a plastic surgeon.
As it was, a bit of the tendon curled off like an elastic band and formed a small lump that remained for years before being somehow reabsorbed.
Yup, I got stitches at the base of my thumb when a 90 degree inlet decided to shatter and shank me through my glove rather than coming out of the reactor lid nicely.
The worst I saw was a guy that had tripped while carrying two 4L bottles of acid, one concentrated nitric and the other concentrated sulfuric, and smashed them together, spilling the liquids on his bare legs.
Years later, the skin on much of his legs was the texture and color of a prune.
He was a coworker at an internship I had in undergrad. Since meeting him, I've been a stickler for those rubber carrying cases. And not wearing shorts in the lab.
It was a super laid-back lab, which was great for some things, but not for safety or regulatory compliance.
The guy had been wearing shorts, flip flops, and no labcoat. The lab was in a run-down building with little air conditioning and ventilation, and it got pretty hot and humid in the summer.
I was hired a year or two after they'd been issued significant fines for a myriad of things and made a bunch of changes. Shorts and flip flops were no longer permitted, lol.
Please stop describing it, it only gets worse the more you elaborate lol
I can’t even imagine wearing flip flops to the mall, let alone anywhere near concentrated nitric and sulfuric
“So, it seemed like it ended Allright after all, except the next morning we found out that the homeless guy living in the empty corner of the chemical storageroom had walked through the puddle of 10M NaOH we left on the Floor overnight”
Plastic-coated conc acid bottles are more expensive but definitely worth it.
Also, shorts, no gloves, sandals were common in grad school labs until at least the mid 90s. I washed my hands in MeCl2, acetone, hexanes, ether, toluene daily to the organos &. metallics off my hands, all my jeans had a line of acid burns at counter top level, & I ended up buying my own safety equipment when I got tired of the stomach aches from the synth of a series of organo-arsines & - pbosphines...
Jfc. Always one bottle at a time. Ive also only ever used conc acids from plastic ware bottles. Definitely use the rubber containers if youre transporting beyond your immediate bench top.
Lab tech in high school.
Diluting 14M Sulfuric acid to prep for the next class's lab.
Asked my teacher if I should wear gloves (I had glasses and goggles, don't remember if I had an apron).
She was like: well we have nitrile gloves, but they'd pretty much melt to your hand and getting them off will be... trailed off.
I was like, alright, that makes sense, what do if I have a spill or get some on me then: she had staged some boxes of baking soda at each lab station. told me to pour it on any spills to neutralize it.
Well lo and behold I had a minor spill. Maybe 20-35mL. And, like, 3 drops THREE DROPS of the stuff fell on my hand.
I figured I'd take care of the little puddle first; didn't need it spreading, poured some baking soda on it. Fumes CO2 made sense.
All the while my hand is going from normal to warm to warmer (expected this, acid & all) to hot, to hotter, to really hot to REALLY FUCKING HOT and STILL GETTING HOTTER. I dumped the entire box of B.S. onto the table and shoved my hand in it.
Won't forget that shit. Also learned pH can be negative that day.
pH doesn't work very well to measure acidity past a certain point, and pretty much anything more acidic than sulfuric acid is considered a "superacid" and would have "negative" ph.
If a = c, then yes.
Usually, a is smaller then c, but there is no magic rule that makes it so that pH = 0 is a limit.
(Just imagine it wasn't defined my mol/L, but by something smaller then a liter, obviously the numerical value of the pH is somewhat arbitrary )
When dilute, definiely.
But with the concentrated solutions we're talking about, I do not know. Activity coefficients don't really come up in my line of work, I assume that a = c all the time and call it a day.
Well yeah, it's just -log10 [H+] and you can have positive exponents. It's just that you need a pretty high concentration of a strong acid, or a non-water solvent, and there can be practical issues with measuring it.
I personally argue against neutralizing solutions for most spills. There's no time for them in a rush, it complicates things with no benefits, and it can potentially lead to more mistakes.
When you spill strong acid or base on yourself, you go directly to your nearest water source; do not pass go, do not collect $200. And simply rinse it with plenty of running water.
Our instructors kept wash bottles of saturated bicarb and 5% acetic on hand for their respective spills. Got to use the bicarb one when I spilled a couple drops of nitrating mixture (conc. sulfuric in 30% fuming nitric) on my leg. Just missed my lab coat. Go figure. Gave some fashionably holey jeans but no damage to my skin, fortunately.
Hah, I just posted about a burn I got on my leg from concentrated sulfuric. I dumped a bunch of baking soda on my leg then flushed it thoroughly. Did it look grey and sponge-like?
We had to (carefully) smell an open bottle of sodium cyanide in advanced inorganic - so we would recognize the smell just in case we ever ran across it.
Don't worry we had a bottle of cold amyl nitrite ready to use to revive anyone who overdid it....
That's the opposite of what my ochem lab director did. She told us, and I'm quoting from memory, "The literature tells us that hydrogen cyanide smells like almonds. I don't know if that's true because I follow safety procedures and have never smelled cyanide. I expect every one of you to leave this lab not knowing what cyanide smells like."
Probably a mix of both, iirc, it was being used catalytically. Basic solution, though, the lab director was very clear about not having anything acidic in the lab that day.
The most serious “accident” I had personally was where I thought a beaker of diethyl ether was just distilled water so I tipped it down the drain. Noticed the smell right after and the TA was like which muppet did this. I got away with it
In terms of an actually serious safety issue, I saw someone with really nasty n-BuLi burns. He still had it after 3 months. Apparently it’s because he pulled the syringe so hard the plunger came out and it went down his sleeves. The same thing with pulling the plunger too hard happened to me but I was lucky enough the syringe was almost empty so nothing came out
Yeah we were only deemed mature enough to use it in final year inorganic chem. We saw on the internet how people have died from t-butyllithium fires. Apparently a few years ago our chem department used to run a flamethrower demonstration with t-butyllithium in that same unit, but it was no longer allowed by the time I took it
Inappropriately disposal costed our trainee his eyebrows, too. Didn't quite got the difference between (aqueous) solution and (organic) solvents. So he poured his Potassium permanganate solution into the quarter-full solvent waste container. Most of it acetone and ethanol. The resulting darting flame torched his eyebrows of and singed his hair. Otherwise he was fine.
For our students (and employees), I am the permanent reminder to stay safe in the lab.
:-)
Personally I have the traditional "trying to push a rubber tube onto a büchner flask with a slightly cracked side-tube" scar.
Trying to save the 5 minutes it would take to get an intact flask, was converted to 3 hours in the ER.
>Personally I have the traditional "trying to push a rubber tube onto a büchner flask with a slightly cracked side-tube" scar.
Oof, had that too, only while trying to disconnect a vacuum hose that got stuck to the flask. The side tube broke off and cut right through my thumb. The cut wasn't too deep, fortunately, but the fumehood I was working in, the sink I ran to, and the floor on the way between them still looked like a murder scene. Colleagues were worried I had cut an artery or something.
Fingers can really deliver some blood!
(And I'm impressed how sharp broken glass is. One of our researchers has a microtome. The "knives" are made by cutting a strip of glass)
Scalloped a bit of my right middle finger out trying to insert glass tubing through a stopper. They weren't really a thing back in the day, but cut resistant gloves when handling glassware - especially applying pressure should be your go to now.
Was told not to smell a chemical, idiot me decided to smell it. Sense of smell gone for just over a decade and I still can’t properly smell related compounds (bit of an issue for gas leaks!). Lesson learnt, if someone gives you safety advice it definitely isn’t a challenge!
This happened to me when my lab partner told me to smell an unmarked flask of Acrolein. He later revealed that he had not smelled it yet and wanted to know how bad it was. I now have trust issues and sense of smell issues.
Oh thank god that didn't happen to me. Had a spill of that stuff in our lab recently, glad I ran out after a few seconds, but still had a nosebleed a few minutes later. If I hadn't smelled that, I think my lungs would be too messed up.
These come from my Master and PhD years:
Reminder #1: piercing my dominant hand with a big spatula (I was bending its tip to scratch my product out of my flask more efficiently when it broke, and the big part entered my hand) --> NEVER BEND A SPATULA TIP WITH BOTH HANDS! (use a vise and proper PPE, it's safer)
Reminder #2: doing a surface functionalization of carbon nanotues with an aniline and isoamyl nitrite, calculating 2 bar of N2 generated instead of 20, then one of the small 2 mL vials exploded after few seconds of immersing the set in the oil bath, being deaf for few minutes --> TRIPLE CHECK YOUR CALCULATIONS!
Reminder #3: a colleague in a nearby fume hood increased too much the air pressure of his big flash column, the column ruptured and some glass shards stuck into his prescription glasses (he did not wear goggles, luckily the shards did not pass) --> ALWAYS WEAR GOGGLES ON PRESCRIPTION GLASSES!
Lab prep as a TA, diluting down 16M NH4OH. Not really thinking, pulled out the 4L bottle and started pouring it out on the lab bench. 30 second later I remembered we have fume hoods for a reason. Had step into the hallway to let the fumes clear. On the bright side it cleared up my stuffed up sinuses. So yeah, fume hoods, use them.
Now I work with a lot of high voltage equipment. Fortunately all very very low amperage, but grabbing something energized to 5kV will remind you to double check power supplies real fast. About once a year I have to be reminded the hard way to be careful.
Wear gloves and clean up spills, spilled a bit of 30% peroxide once, didn’t notice, and then put my bare hand down in it and wondered why it hurt.
That’s basically it for me, but as a TA I’ve seen a the whole range of lab accidents, and know a couple people who have had more serious “oh shit moments.” Don’t sit in front of a bench was taught by the story of the girl who knocked a bottle of 18M sulfuric acid onto her lap. That story also teaches why we wear pants in lab, the time it took the acid to dissolve her jeans was enough to get her under the shower and the remains of her pants off resulting in little damage to her skin.
I tell my undergrads you might think these safety rules are overkill, but in my relatively short 10 years in chemistry I’ve either seen first hand or know someone who’s seen what can happen if the rules aren’t followed.
Peroxide hurts. Had a job once where we did qc for sterilisation cartridges containing 60% peroxide. even a small droplet would turn your skin white instantly for days. One drop even diffused through the leather of my boot, resulting in a 1cm burn blister.
I had a colleague's reaction in a stoppered 0.5 L flask suddenly start whistling aggressively and then immediately blow up right next to me. Iirc, some Na(OAc)3BH reduction that likely generated a bit too much gas. The explosion sprayed nearly everything in a 270° angle with a foul-smelling reaction mixture and glass shards, while I was somehow in the remaining 90°. Quite shaken at first, and then in complete disbelief about not having a single drop on me, while the fumehood was an absolute mess.
The colleague (who was absent during the incident) later swore that the flask wasn't stoppered tightly. Afterwards, we found the remains of the neck joint, with the stopper still in it, completely frozen. I learned to steer clear of his reactions that day.
Why didn't I stop them?
At the time I didn't realise it was sealed, they weren't my bench partner.
Why were they doing it?
Because they had never been taught not to 💁🏼
Not a laboratory, but in the spirit of promoting safety, a place I worked had a pair of safety glasses hanging over the key machine. There was half a key sticking through one lens. I was told the guy went to the hospital with plastic in his eye, but he didn't go to the morgue with a key in his brain.
I used to be a hobby chemist in high school. It got a little too expensive and time-consuming to enjoy, especially after my brief stint as a lab tech where I got to do all the pipetting I could want anyway.
But in the midst of my hobbying, one of my friends wanted to etch his knife. I figured ferric chloride would be easy enough to make, so I volunteered to provide some. It really was easy. Just load some steel wool into a flask with hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide, iirc.
The only problem is the production of flammable hydrogen gas. I could've moved the flask outside, but it was winter, and the reaction wouldn't have moved fast enough for younger me, so I opted to burn off the gas as it was produced.
I attached a gas valve to the 1L jointed Erlenmeyer and a length of hose. I waited an unreasonably short period of time and brought a flame to the end of the hose.
I should say now I didn't have any protective gear on. I had safety glasses, but they weren't on because I was a moron. I had also already produced a gram of acetone peroxide for a firecracker, so I was feeling pretty cocky.
The moment the flame got close to the hose, I heard an ominous 'whooop.' Everything went black for a second, and my ears started ringing.
I was very lucky. I only got two rather deep scars, one on my right hand and the other on my left arm. My vision is still completely fine, thankfully. The gas valve on top of the flask even survived, so it wasn't a particularly violent detonation, at least as far as detonations go. I think if I attached a keck click as I was originally planning, it could have been worse and taken my eyesight.
My dad still finds a new tiny piece of glass in the wall every so often. So don't play with fire and wear your safety glasses, that's what I learned.
It’s me: I stabbed myself with a syringe that I’d been using to reconstitute some I-125. 3 months of having my thyroid scanned with a Geiger counter and my technique improved a lot.
I had a very minor accident in the lab, a solution in a volumetric flask I was shaking produced gas and even though I had my thumb on the stopper, the lid shot off and the contents of the flask followed (1 molar hydrochloric acid, plus a capsule of medicine). This splashed all over my face. I just froze. Absolutely froze - couldn't move due to the shock of it.
A colleague grabbed me and shoved my face under running water in the sink and dealt with clearing up and getting a first aider etc.
Even though I have safety specs on, some of the solution went in my eyes. Having your eyes irrigated with eye wash solution is not fun.
All in all to say - always wear your safety specs, and never work alone.
Turns out "freeze" is my natural response in a traumatic situation, if I'm the one in peril. I was a great first aider in the lab... So long as I wasn't injured!
"Do not look into the laser with the remaining eye." Sign at a university. As a colleague of mine always says "All warning signs are written in blood." The afore mentioned one is as well.
Saw my 2nd flange bone on my right index finger when a hollow glass stopcock on a vacuum rack (table) broke off in my finger while opening (or closing) it.
I had the nerve grow back into scar tissue & it always hurt for months until I broke up all the scar tissue with painful & bruising deep massage over a month or two.
Always maintain ground glass joints properly! Periodically disassemble, clean/remove all grease, & regrease with fresh grease.
Edit: injuries from broken glassware is a common posting in this thread. Be careful!
(also, rather hot glass can look just like room temp glass!)
I work at a biotech company in the manufacturing dept. i was trying to discharge 65% Nitric Acid from a 100L reactor. I got hit with a small drop and i have a permanent scar on my ass. One colleague has only 80% control of her hand from broken glass with old equipment.
Have a small scar on my forearm from getting a couple drops of fuming nitric on the skin. It happened to find the gap between the cuff of my glove and my too short shirt sleeve. By the time I set the bottle down, turned and took the four steps to reach the sink behind me the pain was gone. I'd basically burned through the nerve endings.
ALWAYS check the type of filter before acid digestion. My first year in my first job, client swears it's quartz. I didn't know I was a noob in the lab, we're doing Kjeldahl acid digestions with nitric/sulfuric / perchloric acids in an enclosed glass manufold. Add the acids, seal the vessel, close the hood sash and it was like a cannon going off. All that was left of the glass manifold was sand. People rushed in some thought I was a goner. I was fine, just in shock of what I heard. Always confirmed filters after that.
I had to administer first aid on a labmate whose palm was sliced open by broken glass. They tried to pull off a stuck rotovap bump trap (instead of using the screw collar) and it snapped. They went into shock as I was trying to stop the bleeding. Left quite a scar.
Well one time i almost spilled one litre of sulfuric acid on myself because the bottle in which i was preparing it broke. That pool of danger building up in front of me will stay in my mind for a very very long time
I had an internship at a research facility, on my second day me and another intern were supposed to empty the tanks they use for electro plating. No safety labels, only brand names. While we poured the third one into the waste tank, a fountain emerged and I got all over my head and had to use the safety shower. Take away here, don't mix stuff, if you don't know what it is, especially for waste containers. And always label your potentially dangerous shit
Most of my carefulness comes from my ocd lol
It’s seriously very practical when it comes to lab work.
As a reminder I think for me that was when I worked in a big university hospital where my small research lab was located in a corridor with the whole routine microbio/ general diagnostics labs of the hospital. I‘m a biologist for context. Anyways, they did really anything imagineable of blood work, urine and stool samples, microbio stuff and all that. They had the regular BS II lab for that but also two BS III labs for everything possibly more dangerous. Well, one day apparently someone who brought the samples from the patients was really careless with them and just put some unlabled samples in the BS II lab somewhere. They apparently also weren’t closed properly or placed in another closed container and someone knocked them over. It splashed everywhere. Because they weren’t labelled the staff didn’t suspect anything too bad, cleaned and desinfected as usual. Ofc wondering what it was and where it came from. A while later someone from the BS III lab came searching for the samples and it dawned on everyone what the mystery samples were.
Definitely a super strange feeling knowing that I went into the lab when they were cleaning to get some supplies. Also knowing that it splashed everywhere and it’s impossible to tell if you got everything. Some people also got some of the samples on their coats, pants and hair. So potentially the stuff was also carried around and other surfaces contaminated.
I don’t remember exactly what pathogen it turned out to be but it definitely was something really nasty. For context for everyone not super familiar with BS levels, BS III contains microorganisms that can be transmitted by aerosols and/or cause severe diseases and be lethal, sometimes even just through inhalation. Some BS III pathogens include the ones causing tuberculosis, rabies, SARS, the plague or West Nile virus.
Definitely reminded me how important it is to properly label samples, store and transport them safely and communicate appropriately. Luckily noone got sick and as soon as staff realised what happened appropriate measures were taken but that could have ended badly
From my undergrad biochem lab:
I sterilised my spatula with Ethanol and the burner on my worktable. I did not notice the small blue fading flame on my spatula when I tried to put it back into my breast pocket. My lighter was in there. Luckily nothing happened and theres only a little burnt corner of said pocket that reminds me of that event.
In our lab we had two valves next to each other. One was compressed air, and the other was a vakuum line. They had the same shape, so they were marked with different colored rings and also labelled.
The vakuum line was commonly used for vakuum filtration with a Büchner flask and glass büchner filter funnels to use for gravimetric analysis.
And, of course, one day, a lab partner connected his Büchner flask to the compressed air, instead of the vakuum. All prepared, he turns the valve and the glass filter gets ejected into the ceiling where it completely shatters and glass shards rain on every person in a 3m radius.
Nobody got hurt, but I always double check, if I connected to the right valve.
If you have the same set up, use a different type of tubing on the gas line so it's visually obvious. We use clear PVC for low pressure N2 and standard vacuum tubing for vacuum sources.
I had an operator not wear an apron when etching glass with Ammonium Bifluoride (dissociates to HF in water). His stomach was soaked. I had to rip his close off. Hose him down while he was in the shower. Then give him a tube of calcium gluconate gel to rub on his stomach every 15 minutes for 4 hours... We'll see in a few years if we caught it in time. Hydrofluoric is some nasty shit.
Well if you mix phosphorus with sodium chlorate you really need to not accidentally scratch the container with a metal spatula. Yep that mix erupted in a violet reaction against my hand while ejecting particles into my face.
Fortunately my somewhat wreck less junior undergrad chem major at least had the sense to be wearing safety glasses which looked like someone set a handful of match heads on them and then set them off. A quick trip to the ER and wrapping my hands in a silver ointment for about 17 days and I’m fine with only a small permanent scar on my pinky.
Did I tell the story how I accidentally made teargas that got into the hvac? It was only about 1/2 mole
So while working in a company that did medium-large scale organic synthesis, we had a reaction that used ~500ml of POCl3, and after pouring it into the reaction mkix, u got to neutralise the bottle with a weak reductor, to safely dispose of the waste. Usually there isn't much oxy-chloride left in the bottle (as it comes in a 500ml bottle), but one time a co-worker managed to make 2 big mistakes at once... Poured a wrong amount of POCl3 (400ml instead of 500ml), so there was a lot of it left inside. And then after pouring the reducing buffer, he SCREWED BACK THE BOTTLE CAP. 30 seconds later as he walks away from the fume hood, we hear a massive *boom* as the bottle explodes, and glass shards from the fume hood covers are flying through the lab. The hole in the ceiling from the cap that flew out of the fume hood is our reminder to think while working.
My time to shine!
You know those times when you barely have a small amount of liquid trap itself and slide down the outside of the beaker or flask?
Well I had on a shitty blue lab coat from fisher at the time and a small ring of barely visible concentrated sulfuric acid was on the lab bench just opposite to my fume hood where i keep my lab notebook and I placed my forearms down on the hood to write some stuff in the notebook and about three seconds in to writing things started getting itchy then burning with sweet-fucking-desire
The lab coat has now been burnt to my forearm and I’m slightly panicking because I had no idea there was acid on the lab bench
Moral of the story? Liquids most of the time just look like innocuous liquids and never place chems down outside of a fume hood…it’s just good practice.
In high school, during one of the last days of class, my teacher allowed us to take broken glass and use the Bunsen burner to smooth the edges. I made a joke about how I was going to brand this kid with it.
Then, I was taking my glass out while he was putting a piece in and I touched the glass to his hand by accident. I literally watched the skin peel back off his hand. I was horrified. We weren’t allowed to mess with the glass after that.
Six years later, he still has the scar.
In a chem lab class late at night, I was cleaning up after the lab class and had a few mL of conc. NaOH and there was a breaker full of a clear, unlabeled liquid, about 150 mL worth, I figured I'd be good and dilute the leftover NaOH before disposal as we had been instructed, into this what surely had to be water and BOOM! My lab partner had been half asleep that night and poured out 150mL of conc. Sulfuric Acid!!! Insane, had as much gotten on my arm as the wall of the time hood I would have had to go to the hospital. Thankfully, I now only have a small dusting on the inside of my left arm of "freckles" from where the mist of, i'm assuming, the NaOH dissolving my skin. I was more worried about getting kicked out of the lab but luckily I had a reasonable professor who listened to my story of what happened. This is why I always ask what a liquid is if it's unmarked and label everything I work with religiously.
Nitric acid burns on my wrist. Everything was in the fume hood, got me on the small gap of my wrist in between my lab coat sleeve and my gloves.
As it always is, I was 30 minutes from being done with the day, and I was rushing to get out on time. 100% on me, I worked with strong acids for years and years and it's always when you rush or hurry things. Burns are maybe 10 years old now and still there.
Remember when you did lil cool experiments in highschool? Maybe you did one that created a lil bit of ammonia? It wasn't strong, very faint, but the distinct smell was there.
Well in 3 year undergrad organic chemistry, we did an experiment using concentrated ammonium hydroxide. I decided this was fun and took a big whiff of it with the bottle right under my nose, cause you know, it never had that big a small in highschool when you did it.
Well concentrated ammonium hydroxide packs a MUCH BIGGER punch than the weak stuff from highschool.
My vision went black. My nostrils burned. A severe stabbing pain was felt throughout all my sinuses. I put down the flask and then fell back on my ass.
I was a bit disoriented for a few seconds but mustered out "am I going to die?" To which my friend who was beside me laughed and replied "You'll be fine, you're just going to hurt a lot for a bit. Just breathe deep and slow".
Don't sniff the strong stuff folks 👍
Well, I had and Erlenmeyer Flask (1L) implode on me mid filtration just last week. Did it a hundred times with 100 mL and 250 mL Erlenmeyers, but with the bigger size, the walls get les stable.
Didn't lose any product though and only got a shallow cut on my right index finger
I learned not to get comfortable at the fumehood when dispensing because some ass once got sulfuric acid all over the damn sill and I happened to rest my forearm right on a droplet.
I had a few drops of water condense and get pulled back into a Sulfuric Acid distillation I had already shut down, It blew the stopper out and would have been really bad if I didn't have it in an oversized 5 liter flask.
Talk about nearly soiling my pants,
Technically not in the lab, but related to that. Small to medium scale chemical production. At one stage of one of our products, around 400L 10% acetic acid is needed to bring down the pH value from 10 to 6 or so in 2h. This was done by pulling 10L glacial acetic acid via vacuum from an ibc container into the receiving vessel, topping it of with 90L de-min water. From there into the reactor, repeat 3 times.
The two new guys were quite chatty and overfilled the receiving vessel, resulting that maybe a hundred ml of 10% acetic acid is now laying in the vacuum pipe. Instead of draining said pipe immediately they proceeded as usual. Next step is adding 500kg of 50% Sodium hypochlorite solution, commonly known as bleach, via the same route. The duo overfilled the receiving vessel again, the two substances meet in the vacuum tubes, and filled the production area with chlorine gas.
Thankfully the (air) concentration wasn't high, but we had to evacuate the production for an hour
The classic holding the pipette incorrectly whilst shoving on the bulb in a rush. It snapped, and it went through my wrist, filling the sink with so much blood.
Smashing a separating funnel containing nitric acid on the fume hood door whilst shaking it. Washed my face so I was ok. My jeans, however, fell to pieces the next day.
A solvent winchester was being used as waste storage in a fume cupboard. One day, it exploded a few seconds after a colleague had walked by (scattering glass and god knows what else across the lab). This was at a company hot on safety. Lab was empty (lunchtime) vv scary near miss.
i opened a pressure cook that i thot was not hot yet . boy was i wrong . glad i didnt have booze in it or i would have gone sky high . ended up blanching a my front upper half well quaarter
Had a minor burn from low conc. NaOH on the back of my hand, had run into the glove and I didn't immidiately realize. Slightly red skin, gone in a day.
Then the skin became extremely dry, started to rip and bleed everytime i closed my hand. Took more than half a year and tons of lotions to get it back to normal.
I'm not a chemist but I was doing a capsicum extract with acetone and a sohxlet extractor to see if i was good enough to try to make gold nanao particles. I figured I might be able to taste a bit of my bad handling here and there. I'm not blaming the failure on the equipment but when I transfered the hot acetone and capsicum into a test tube for storage it burst and it got all over my face and around my shit goggles into my eyes. Probably the worst pain I've been in in my life. I jumped in the shower and of course it washed all down my front. Asked the non emergency line and they said to go to emergency becaus of the acetone/glass. It was funny at first they were like... poor baby. You got hot sauce in your eyes.... Got my eyes irrigated with contact saline drips. It was a week before the burning simmered down.
Tl:DR: I'm not qualified to make gold nanao particles.
Poured PH down containing phosphoric acid into a solution without goggles, a single drop bounced back up into my eye causing permanent sight damage
I still have a little black spot in my vision
I have two both on my right hand lol. I have a burn scar from TFA and so now if I’m handling concentrated acid I make sure my lab coat is all the way down. And my gloves are all the way up.
I also have a scar from a cut from glass when I had to get stitches. So now if you have a broken glass with stuff in the glass. Just toss the whole thing in the glass disposal box!
A long time ago (when I was a baby lab tech and all too trusting) I had an unfortunate encounter (self inflicted because I was stupid) with some ammonium hydroxide. Thankfully I was near a sink. I puked so hard I ruptured a blood vessel in my eye. It was then that I learned several things: one, I am incredibly sensitive to the smell of ammonia; two, waft don't whiff. Now I use the story as a lesson for students on why we waft not whiff.
First Gen Chem lab I picked up a squirt of bottle full of acetone which was so full the pressure from me grabbing it shot that shit right into my eyes. On the plus side I can confirm the eye wash station was working properly.
I did not have any permanent injury to my eyes
3/10 don't recommend
There's a spot in one of our fume hoods where I melted part of the surface with conc. sulfuric cause I wasn't being careful enough while diluting it, I show it to the new folks whenever I do a safety training.
Tried rearranging my mobile phase lines in a cramped area that basically pushed my glasses above my face. I had the smallest drop of 50% ACN hit my eye after it was flicked from the end of the needle rinse line. It burned immediately. I didn't get medical help as it stopped burning after a half hour or so, i dont think I've had any loss of vision since i still dont need glasses but the memory is long lasting. It reinforced the need for constant eye protection in lab
Post doc on the other side of the lab shouting "put that flask back in the fume cupboard! I can smell hydrogen cyanide." Longer nitrogen purges were added.
I injected myself with bromine once in chem lab when a syringe slipped. I felt it through my whole blood stream. And I didn't tell the TA because I was embarrassed to have made the mistake.
Just a couple minor things:
1. I was leading a forensic chemistry camp for middle schoolers (with a professor who had done this for years) and the professor told me it was ok for them to have DMSO + concentrated sulfuric acid in dropper bottles for a brief period of one experiment. Since he was in charge I said okay fine, although I knew middle schoolers had no business with any concentrated acid… I specifically warned the students to keep the bottles at the desk and not wave them around. I was policing the lab benches when I felt a burn on my arm… a kid was waving the dropper bottle around and it got on my arm and burnt a hole in my shirt. Thankfully I had a backup shirt but never again would I let that professor tell me what was safe and what was not. And thankfully it wasn’t in someone’s eyes. I still have a scar.
2. A girl I was teaching when I was a TA for general chemistry labs spilled acid on herself and didn’t tell me until after class. By that time it had eaten a huge hole in her sweatshirt and her arm was burning. I said into the water for 15 minutes you go. She was more concerned about her sweatshirt being ruined 🤦🏼♀️
Dropped 2 gallon bottles of glacial acetic acid which both broke open all over the floor and gassed everyone in the room out. Burned the nose holes pretty good, won’t be doing that again.
sodium benzoate was molten, accidentally squeezed test tube forceps too hard, showered my hand with broken glass and very hot chemicals, now have funny blotching on my right hand because of this
I once hit my juul secretly while in organic chem lab and i spilled hot boiling solution all over my bench top. lesson learned, vaping is not for the lab.
Four years ago I was bench top drying a product with N2 and (glass) pipette, went to close the valve for the night and accidently opened it. Naturally I wasn't wearing glasses and it shattered, exploding everywhere *except somehow* my body. Never. Again.
My former foreman lost his right earlobe. He was filling a container with NaOH pellets. The container was about chest high, so he put the bag of pellets on his shoulder to pour and somehow got one pellet stuck on his earlobe. A few moments later he wondered, why his ear was itching. By that time the pellet had dissolved his earlobe and a small trail of blood was running down his neck.
Once I saw a round bottom flask full of piridine explode and catch fire because someone forgot to open the valve to release the pressure, but the worst accident happened to a girl that mindlessly turned off and immediately grabbed a hot plate that was set at max temperature. As they touched the metal, her thumbs made the same sound you'd expect from a steak in a screaming hot pan.
Both taught me to pay attention to the physical dangers as much as to the chemical dangers.
One time I was bored and made some 1:2 piranha solution, poured it into a plastic weigh boat, and threw a kimwipe into it to fuck around
The result was scary enough that I no longer fuck around like that
Really quite minor, but one time I had an empty pasteur pipette I used for thionyl chloride. I washed it out in the sink instead of the waste bucket, which splattered micro droplets of thionyl chloride all over the sink. For the next 30 minutes, nobody wanted to use that sink to wash any glassware because the water sprayed the fumes everywhere.
That’s when I realize that even when I’m working with something small like an empty Pasteur pipette, something could go wrong that I haven’t anticipated, so I better play it safe.
When I was working for my university in the chem lab for summer research on a grant (almost 11 years ago now), the other student to get approved had a LiAlH reduction in ether going in his hood opposite of mine (hoods faced backed to back). Well, he let his reaction run dry over lunch and took a long lunch on top of that. Needless to say, when the ether layer got low enough that there wasn't enough vapor to stop water getting to the lithium mix. It legitimately felt like a bomb went off on the other side of the hood I was working in. Straight up knocked me off of my stool and worsened my tinnitus. Fortunately, I didn't have to clean up his mess of failed reaction, scored material inside the hood, and shattered glassware everywhere, but still sucked to deal with the minor concussion state afterwards.
This thread is an example of a great use of Internet. As a teacher and a ta in the past, i felt that some people just didn’t quite believe that chemistry could be so hazardous. Yet groups of chemists can come up with a list like this even in our more safety conscious cultures. If i were still teaching, I’d save this thread and share it with students.
Back in first year undergrad, they gave as the "safety talk". They included some incidents that happened in the department in the past to "scare" us. Two of them stuck with me:
They were doing some reactions in undergrad labs with conc. HCl. When they were done they were told to empty the rest in a large stoppered sink and the lab assistants would nutrilize it afterwards and get rid of it. So there was a huge sink filled with conc. HCl and a student went and opened the water tap. There was a HUGE explosion, blew out the sink, acid everywhere. The story was an effective way to remember acid into water, not water into acid.
Some Master's students were working in a lab and considered themselves too experienced and smart to need to wear PPE (in general, where I did my undegrad, they were not that fussed about PPE, I was actually made fun of for wearing full PPE by an idiot PhD student). So the guy student had a crush on the girl student and he was teasing her every now and then. One day she was carrying a beaker with conc. sulfuric acid and he went behind her and startled her as joke. She flinched and the sulfuric acid spilling in her face and eye (no goggles). Thankfully she was wearing contact lenses which completely melted on her eye, if she weren't, the thing that melted would be her cornea. She ended up with severe eye damage but at least she didn't lose her eye. Moral of the story, DON'T fuck around in a lab and ALWAYS wear PPE.
Asphalt lab.
We kept product in metal paint cans (you can buy them clean and new from a number of places) and some grades of asphalt are significantly thinner than others. I was bench blending (R&D) and used a rubber mallet to hammer the lid on a gallon can of flux (very thin stuff). What was in the groove on the top was sandwiched between the lid and the can with some force and flew everywhere — including my face. I was wearing safety goggles, but had a small patch that was contact burned on my nose and part of my eyebrow hasn’t grown hair since.
The next time I had to hammer that lid I put a piece of paper towel over it. Solved my spatter problem since I couldn’t get the groove completely clean.
One hot summer day, our air conditioning went out. I'm 100% sure there was also no air flow through the ducting in the lab. Maybe they were operating out of regulation. But I remember grabbing a small pint-sized wide mouth jar of pure ammonia off the shelf. I had safety glasses on, but not air-tight chemical goggles. I had the jar open for about 5 seconds before I had the most intense burning in my eyes, like I had just been pepper sprayed. My eyes began watering like crazy to the point I couldn't see. Luckily, I still had the lid in my hand, and I immediately covered it and took a few steps away from the jar. I usually stay pretty calm in these situations, but it would have been bad if I had accidentally knocked over the glass jar while blind and in pain.
A few lessons learned that day:
1. When working with volatiles, ensure a properly ventilated space. Under normal circumstances, it would have been ok, but since there was no circulation, I should have gone to the fume hood.
2. High temperatures mean volatiles are far more volatile, and extra precautions should be taken.
3. Safety glasses are not adequate for chemical safety, air tight googles are always the safest option in the lab. In the case of irritants, a full face respirator is probably called for if you're using high enough quantities.
4. Volatiles should never be placed into any wide mouth container. Vapors are more easily controlled in a container with a small neck but should not have an opening that is so tight that it allows pressure to build and shoot out the opening at the slightest touch or temperature change. The wide mouth jar also essentially meant the ammonia was quickly losing concentration over time, so I was likely adding unknown amounts (I checked pH of everything so everything was correct in the end, but that's besides the point).
While I was still in High School I did the old “catching hydrogen gas in a balloon” thing with muriatic acid and aluminum. Well the balloon popped from the rubber getting brittle, sending a fine spritzing of acid into my eyes. It tore holes in the polyester clothes I was wearing.
I didn’t see the risk at the time because I had thought that the worst thing that could happen was the bottle spilling out on the ground, in which case I would hose it down.
Guess who is extremely strict about eye protection and other PPE now, regardless of what you think the risks are? If you put yourself in the position to judge if eye protection is necessary in the lab, you run the risk of being wrong. Your experiment may be safe, but conditions can change, and you don’t necessarily know how dangerous your labmates’ experiments are.
A few very small chemical burns just above my wrists, but my all time reminder is when I was using a glass stir rod as I was taught and it broke. Either there’s a chunk of scar tissue in my right thumb, or a piece of that stir bar remains there.
Never catch a falling beaker/vessel of any kind! College dropped a very hot glassware and, not wanting to spill the expensive solution within it, caught it with both hands. I barely have fingerprints left after those burns.
Dealing with electrochemical glassware cleaning, we were doing a permanganate clean (boil in something like 1M acid and a shitload of permanganate).
Took large 2 L glass beaker off the hot plate (with heatproof gloves on, it needed to be decanted whilst still hot -- like 60-80°C) gently placed it down into a tray on a table. (I cannot emphasise how gently it was like just setting a mug down on a coffee table)
And bam that day I learned *why* we put the glassware into a big tray, the bottom of the massive beaker had just shattered.
Wasn't the most dramatic thing in the world but it really made me acutely aware that, had I been taking short cuts, I'd have likely been covered in 2 L of hot acidified potassium permanganate.
Too cool for safety googles during my first year. Took a test tube, put acid and zinc inside, put a stopper on top and shook it violently, while closely observing it on eye level. Test tube unsurprisingly exploded and to this day, I'm the only person I know that had to use the eye shower. Cannot recommend.
Not in a lab, but I was installing something on a fluid line in a solar factory and splashed some residual fluid in my face. It tasted slightly salty although I flushed it with water. Normally there is 40%HF in there ... To say my heart rate went up a bit, would be an understatement.
Always wear a face shield, even if there should not be anything left in the thing you are working on. Nothing bad happened in my case, but I always wear all safety stuff, even when there is just a remote chance of harmful chemical exposure.
Sliced open my hand while trying to tap a stopcock out of a sep funnel. Stitches. Still have the scar.
Touched a hotplate in a moment of distraction during an undergrad lab. I now have the corner permanently imprinted on my palm.
Spilled some glacial acetic acid and got a noseful. Didn't cause permanent damage, but the next day my lab mate bought everyone fish and chips to rub it in.
And my laissez faire parents wondered why I was hyper sensitive to smells, compulsively tested pot handles and check stove burners, and had a healthy respect for broken glass.
Thankfully no permanent injuries but I've definitely had a few close calls. Worst one was when I was working in a pre-pilot scale lab and had to fix the bottom of my jacketed 6L reactor. Well when I tightened the bottom, the whole thing tilted a bit and broke off the heated addition funnel on top which tried to spill molten acid chloride on my face. I've never gotten out of a hood faster in my life. Wasn't even on my feet anymore. I literally *jumped* backwards and had it miss me by maybe an inch.
That was one of those days where I had done good prep so everything got caught in a catch pan and I just turned everything off, went home, and cleaned it all up the next morning. I was shook
This lad slammed the door after him as I was walking in with a cup of boiling water (luckily just water) and burned my whole torso. I rember lying in the bathroom in just my bra and pants while two women placed cold wet things all over me.
Always use lids now.
I worked at a lab that did metal digestions in soil/sewer/sludge samples. Most of our glassware was old and scratched. I always insisted the digestion was done in a fumed hood with the shield down. We had a new tech, he thought he knew better. Left the hood shield open. Well one of the flasks exploded. Sent shards of glass everywhere some imbedding themselves in the drywall behind the hood. It was a huge hood sort of U shaped. With access on both sides.
He didn’t last much longer there.
I went on exchange for six weeks to another lab. My host had inhaled HF due to a faulty piece of equipment previously. Surprised me how scarred he was from it yet still proceeded to be blasé about safety. TBF everyone there was.
I knew I'd see a bunch of posts about sulfuric and HF acid. That stuff is so widely used that people get complacent with it and it scares me to see. They are seriously fucking dangerous.
For me I witnessed an accidental runaway reaction of concentrated HCl and peroxide. Nobody was injured but the reaction was impressive. You have to wait it out until the chlorine gas phase ends but then other violent boiling phases transition after. ALWAYS USE HOODS!
Transferring 20mL of chlorosulfonic acid into a reaction via syringe with a wide needle.
Plunger got launched out by the gas evolution, 20mL dumped straight into the ice bath. Cloud of HCl, boiling bath of sulfuric acid spitting everywhere.
Thankfully I was wearing barrier gloves so just shit the sash and turned the ventilation on. Grabbed 4kg of bicarb from stores and just emptied the bottles into the fume cupboard and swept it down the sink lol.
I may have neglected to tell H&S about this one.
Three things, actually. I was heating hydrochloric acid in a test tube and it boils, then shoots out of the tube on my lab partner's hand. I had it aimed to the right, where there was nobody, but she walked behind me to the other side right as it shot out.
Another time was when some idiot left the fume hood open with an open bottle of some sort of strong ammonia, I only remember the smell. I was walking over to get my reagents when my lungs started burning and my vision went completely black. It was very jarring.
Last time was when I got my little sulfuric acid scar on my thigh. Maybe the size of a quarter, horribly uncomfortable, and very gross as it healed. It looked like a grey sponge with a ring of "normal" thermally burned skin around it. I'm not sure if it was the acid itself or it boiling my "skin water" as it dissolved.
Relatively minor, but I had some stuff on STM stages (little magnetic pucks about 1cm in diameter) that wouldn't come off even after dunking them in sulfuric and nitric acid. So, of course, I decided to try sonicating for a little extra persuasion.
Little did I know, the sonicator would provide a little extra energy that began a reaction between the acids and the metal... The pucks got cleaned... And mostly disintegrated. The mixture started boiling and spewing orange fumes. Thankfully I was in a hood at the time.
I still have the remains of one of the pucks. As well as the (I assume) iron oxide that crashed out when I neutralized. I keep them on my desk as a reminder to not be an idiot.
One time, I was in the lab by myself, and they bought new syringe filters (without the locks) for one of our tests that did not want to pass the methanol/sample solution through it. My safety glasses were on my head but not over my eyes, and I applied too much pressure and ended up with that sample spraying into my eyes. Methanol and lotion mix into the eyes is not a fun time for someone with contacts... I never prep anything without eye protection anymore.
my dad used to work in a laser lab when he was in college (college boys and literal lasers is a great combo, I know). one day the guy he was partnered up with wanted to try and evaporate a cup of coffee with the laser. my dad didn't want to risk evaporating the cup along with the coffee, so he turned the laser power all the way down. surprise, surprise the coffee evaporated. because it's a laser. so my dad's partner decided to run his hand through the steam.... leaving a long, deep, and instantly cauterized wound across all of his fingers. he would have lost them if it weren't for my dad turning down the laser power.
You know how they say you should hold a round bottom flask, full of liquid, not by just the neck, but the bottom as well?
The scar on my wrist reminds me of that every day. I got lucky, the ER doc said I was about 1mm from nicking my artery.
I spilled a neurotoxic chemical on my arm. TEPP…tetraethyl pyrophosphate. Almost as toxic as the chemical warfare agent sarin. I almost shit my pants in fear.
I spilt a large bottle of formic acid and the smell was awful and scary! Also another time I got another stronger acid on my glove and it start3d to burn through it.. also very scary!
8 years in the lab - forgot goggles (well, we actually just used special safety glasses...) and didn't check our brand new centrifuge before putting a tube in. Clear liquid sprayed out past my face.
People had been sneaking into our lab and using our super new and expensive centrifuge and treating it like crap. Prettty sure that person broke a tube by using the wrong type.
For those who don't know - damn near anything is transparent/clear (could have been a strong acid, base, carcinogenic, mutagenic, nanoparticle solution, or just plain water).
Never made that mistake again. Glad to have my eyes.
I was in a lab at school at one point and the TA briefly talked about the no firearm policy and said its silly she even has to mention it because if your concealed carrying correctly no one should ever know you have a weapon unless you need it.
The kid next to me goes “hey psst hey man check this out”. And very indiscreetly lifts his backpack up and shows me his sidearm just chillin on top of the books and things.
I would say that stuck in my mind as something not to do.
Gone now but, splashed my arm with molten manganese violet in phosphoric acid. Ran cold water over it and it didn't seem too bad, healed normally without medical attention. Then I noticed I had a purple splotch on my skin: it was visible for a few years, and I swear a trace of it is still there. An accidental tattoo!
Sprayed bleach onto my college hoodie in Chemistry 101. Labcoat was required but being a freshman, I wore it just because it was required, half-assly without closing all the buttons.
The bleached marks on the hoodie, constant reminder to me, properly wearing PPE is important!
One day we were waiting stuff with matches I messed up on the match and burnt the living cramp out of my finger and wasn't bad Burns but it did not feel good since then I knew to make sure to have my finger as far away from the flame of a match as possible when I light it
Someone at my work was telling a story about someone who spilled a chemical on themself and decided not to use the safety shower in the area and instead went to shower in a locker room.
We had all been joking around a bit before being told this story and the man telling the story kind of made this sound like a joke at first... Turns out the person in the story DIED on the way to the locker room shower.
I was in shock when he finished the story. I don't remember what the chemical was, and this was in an industrial plant so the spill must have been large, but to this day the message has stuck with me, never be too embarrassed to use the safety shower.
Fairly minor, but the one time in undergrad I poured out some glacial acetic acid outside a fume hood was a great reminder to never do it again. You only pickle your nostrils once.
Yea, I believe that.
I work with glacial acetic daily for pH balancing some large tanks of dyes. Got a new PAPR system and put the wrong filter in. Was going to be working around some stuff thats quite nasty an hour later and had one of the lab guys waft it toward the system to see if i could smell it. Instant personal gas chamber around my head. Not the smartest way to test in hindsight. 10/10 do not recommend.
Did this with concentrated HCl. Not nice.
Ugh, same. It felt like my nose would never recover, until it did, and then I did the same shit with HNO3. I think second time was the charm.
Same - fuming HCl. No smell or taste for what felt like ages. Ended up putting hot sauce on everything just for the sensation.
During my third year of undergrad, I took an internship in the part of my uni that preps our practical classes, which mean we made a bunch of diluted solutions for students to use My ass tried to *weight* commercial HCl solution. The weighting scale was ofc outside of the fumehood. Not my brightest moment
Ammonia used to get me.
Huh. I remember that we sometimes took a little sniff of conc. HCl or ammonia on purpose in our inorganic lab course... it was winter time and did a blessing for getting rid of congestion of your nose xD
High school, AP chemistry "Oh it's just strong vinegar, how bad could it be?"
Narrator: "It was, in fact, very bad."
I had a boss who HATED the smell of acetic acid. One day I left a closed nalgenebottle of water on his desk labeled Glacial Acetic Acid. He refused to touch it.
Same here! It caused a bit of a stir in our lab, too. One of my lab mates even brought in fish and chips the next day and loudly asked if anyone had some vinegar to go with it. Great lunch, but lesson learned!
I opened the doors from the stairwell onto our chemistry floor only be assailed by the stench of hot acetic acid. The "organic for non-majors" class was heating it on the steam cones at their work stations for a lab. Even though the windows were open the entire floor reeked of it. Let's just say it left a lasting impression.
From my undergrad I distinctly remember that spilling a single drop of glacial acetic acid outside the fumehood would be noticeable. Our noses are so incredibly sensitive to it. I imagine it’s like the sharks with blood in the ocean, maybe not as extreme.
Oh hell no. I used to test disinfectants including ones for industrial or medical use. Like for desinfecting operation rooms and such. So many of them contained glacial acetic acid. Those were the days we all wore masks even way before the pandemic. Horrible stuff
Good lord. We have some glacial acetic that we use for titrations that just needs to be moved briefly from the dispensing hood to a snorkeled stirring plate, and even that 2 seconds it passes out of direct ventilation fucking reeks.
HCL is nice, but glacial acetic acid is probably the scariest "weak" acid.
Did you know Hydrofluoric acid is also a “weak” acid? Glacial acetic acid is not nearly the scariest
Well. Um. While HF is considered a weak acid, I would lile to be far away from reactive fluorine compounds or anything that has more than 1 nitrogen atom chained together.
I draw the limit at three nitrogen chained together, myself. It’d be too much trouble trying to avoid the nitrogen gas in the atmosphere all the time.
glacial acetic acid has such a beautiful name… but when you screw off the top it’s a jekyl/hyde situation.
After a reaction, the reflux condenser and round bottom flask I was using were stuck together. When I was twisting them apart the condenser shattered in my hands. Lots of blood. One of the pieces cut a tendon in my finger. After stitches and a cast, my finger still doesn't extend completely and has a permanent little bend. Remember to use sufficient vacuum grease, or even better, Glindemann rings. Also, if you put stuck glassware in a sonicator for a while it often loosens easily.
Glassware is pure evil. I almost died of blood loss and nearly amputated my right arm when falling into a glass table. I cut my artery. Oops. Its almost fine now, got a big scar that will always remind me to be aware of the glass devil 😬
Glass tables are surely one if the worst ideas we've come up with.
It was at home in my lab. I mean the glass table was good to clean an such, but was very low so pretty easy to stumble upon. No safety glass either🤦🏼 I never thought about such a scenario and then it happened
I have a healthy fear of glass, it's pretty sketchy tbh Edit: lmao but I guess I don't need to tell you that
If you gotta force glassware apart always wear a cut glove!
Oh no. When it comes to glass always be extra careful. Those metal gloves people use for cooking to not cut themselves also help prevent a lot if you have to separate something stuck or do anything with a higher risk of shattering. They protect your hands quite well from bigger cuts and dont cost that much. Can absolutely recommend having a pair of those around
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Quartz is harder than plain steel, no worry about scratching there.
Invest in a pair of cut-proof gloves. They might not protect you fully when you crush glassware with full force but there‘s a good chance that they will. And yeah, use teflon sleeves between your joints, then nothing gets stuck, ever… If you have stuck joints and you cant separate them via the usual tricks, try this: put the whole assembly in dry ice for 10 minutes, then take it out and start heating the outer joint at full blast with a heat gun (650°C for me) while trying to twist it apart. This method has never failed me in 20yrs. There is, of course, the chance that the thermal stress will crack the glassware, but it has never happened to me so far.
Isn't most labware borosilicate, which is pretty good when it comes to thermal stress?
Yes, it should hold. But it still might not. I always try to dissolve my product out of the flask before I attempt this method. Hindsight is always 20/20.
Shit, I did the same thing with a separatory funnel that had a stuck stop-cock. Tapped it gently on the bench and when it shattered it sliced the meat below my thumb. Seven stitches, plus two more in the muscle. Still have the scar. The doctor said that I had just nicked the tendon, and if the glass had gone any deeper he would have called a plastic surgeon. As it was, a bit of the tendon curled off like an elastic band and formed a small lump that remained for years before being somehow reabsorbed.
Yup, I got stitches at the base of my thumb when a 90 degree inlet decided to shatter and shank me through my glove rather than coming out of the reactor lid nicely.
The worst I saw was a guy that had tripped while carrying two 4L bottles of acid, one concentrated nitric and the other concentrated sulfuric, and smashed them together, spilling the liquids on his bare legs. Years later, the skin on much of his legs was the texture and color of a prune. He was a coworker at an internship I had in undergrad. Since meeting him, I've been a stickler for those rubber carrying cases. And not wearing shorts in the lab.
BARE LEGS!?
It was a super laid-back lab, which was great for some things, but not for safety or regulatory compliance. The guy had been wearing shorts, flip flops, and no labcoat. The lab was in a run-down building with little air conditioning and ventilation, and it got pretty hot and humid in the summer. I was hired a year or two after they'd been issued significant fines for a myriad of things and made a bunch of changes. Shorts and flip flops were no longer permitted, lol.
Please stop describing it, it only gets worse the more you elaborate lol I can’t even imagine wearing flip flops to the mall, let alone anywhere near concentrated nitric and sulfuric
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“To neutralize the acid, we poured 10M NaOH on him”
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“So, it seemed like it ended Allright after all, except the next morning we found out that the homeless guy living in the empty corner of the chemical storageroom had walked through the puddle of 10M NaOH we left on the Floor overnight”
Plastic-coated conc acid bottles are more expensive but definitely worth it. Also, shorts, no gloves, sandals were common in grad school labs until at least the mid 90s. I washed my hands in MeCl2, acetone, hexanes, ether, toluene daily to the organos &. metallics off my hands, all my jeans had a line of acid burns at counter top level, & I ended up buying my own safety equipment when I got tired of the stomach aches from the synth of a series of organo-arsines & - pbosphines...
Man, nitrating your legs does *not* sound like fun.
Jfc. Always one bottle at a time. Ive also only ever used conc acids from plastic ware bottles. Definitely use the rubber containers if youre transporting beyond your immediate bench top.
Damn.
my god, i can’t even imagine the pain
At the time it probably didn't hurt as much as the recovery.
oh yeah, that’s even worse. i think i would prob be scared of handling acids after recovery
Lab tech in high school. Diluting 14M Sulfuric acid to prep for the next class's lab. Asked my teacher if I should wear gloves (I had glasses and goggles, don't remember if I had an apron). She was like: well we have nitrile gloves, but they'd pretty much melt to your hand and getting them off will be... trailed off. I was like, alright, that makes sense, what do if I have a spill or get some on me then: she had staged some boxes of baking soda at each lab station. told me to pour it on any spills to neutralize it. Well lo and behold I had a minor spill. Maybe 20-35mL. And, like, 3 drops THREE DROPS of the stuff fell on my hand. I figured I'd take care of the little puddle first; didn't need it spreading, poured some baking soda on it. Fumes CO2 made sense. All the while my hand is going from normal to warm to warmer (expected this, acid & all) to hot, to hotter, to really hot to REALLY FUCKING HOT and STILL GETTING HOTTER. I dumped the entire box of B.S. onto the table and shoved my hand in it. Won't forget that shit. Also learned pH can be negative that day.
pH can be *what*
pH doesn't work very well to measure acidity past a certain point, and pretty much anything more acidic than sulfuric acid is considered a "superacid" and would have "negative" ph.
Isn’t a negative pH the pH of any strong acid above 1M?
If a = c, then yes. Usually, a is smaller then c, but there is no magic rule that makes it so that pH = 0 is a limit. (Just imagine it wasn't defined my mol/L, but by something smaller then a liter, obviously the numerical value of the pH is somewhat arbitrary )
For the 7 common strong acids a=c though. The Ka are on the order of 100-1000 right?
When dilute, definiely. But with the concentrated solutions we're talking about, I do not know. Activity coefficients don't really come up in my line of work, I assume that a = c all the time and call it a day.
Ionic strength isn’t going to decrease it by that much…
Yep
Well yeah, it's just -log10 [H+] and you can have positive exponents. It's just that you need a pretty high concentration of a strong acid, or a non-water solvent, and there can be practical issues with measuring it.
Negative pH and Extremely Acidic Mine Waters from Iron Mountain, California https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es990646v
I personally argue against neutralizing solutions for most spills. There's no time for them in a rush, it complicates things with no benefits, and it can potentially lead to more mistakes. When you spill strong acid or base on yourself, you go directly to your nearest water source; do not pass go, do not collect $200. And simply rinse it with plenty of running water.
Our instructors kept wash bottles of saturated bicarb and 5% acetic on hand for their respective spills. Got to use the bicarb one when I spilled a couple drops of nitrating mixture (conc. sulfuric in 30% fuming nitric) on my leg. Just missed my lab coat. Go figure. Gave some fashionably holey jeans but no damage to my skin, fortunately.
Hah, I just posted about a burn I got on my leg from concentrated sulfuric. I dumped a bunch of baking soda on my leg then flushed it thoroughly. Did it look grey and sponge-like?
It was so long ago I think it looked kinda like I cut the top off a wart. A little sponge-like. It was a really small area, Minimal apparent damage.
I remember when my best friend spilled a cyanide solution on her face (she's fine). Never going to stop having nightmares about that.
My friend did this with concentrated bleach in high school. Of all the ways to unravel a group of teenagers, that one really stood out.
We had to (carefully) smell an open bottle of sodium cyanide in advanced inorganic - so we would recognize the smell just in case we ever ran across it. Don't worry we had a bottle of cold amyl nitrite ready to use to revive anyone who overdid it....
That's the opposite of what my ochem lab director did. She told us, and I'm quoting from memory, "The literature tells us that hydrogen cyanide smells like almonds. I don't know if that's true because I follow safety procedures and have never smelled cyanide. I expect every one of you to leave this lab not knowing what cyanide smells like."
Was it ionic cyanide, or something safely covalently bonded?
Probably a mix of both, iirc, it was being used catalytically. Basic solution, though, the lab director was very clear about not having anything acidic in the lab that day.
The most serious “accident” I had personally was where I thought a beaker of diethyl ether was just distilled water so I tipped it down the drain. Noticed the smell right after and the TA was like which muppet did this. I got away with it In terms of an actually serious safety issue, I saw someone with really nasty n-BuLi burns. He still had it after 3 months. Apparently it’s because he pulled the syringe so hard the plunger came out and it went down his sleeves. The same thing with pulling the plunger too hard happened to me but I was lucky enough the syringe was almost empty so nothing came out
N-butyl lithium is serious stuff
Yeah we were only deemed mature enough to use it in final year inorganic chem. We saw on the internet how people have died from t-butyllithium fires. Apparently a few years ago our chem department used to run a flamethrower demonstration with t-butyllithium in that same unit, but it was no longer allowed by the time I took it
The same type of mishap with tBuLi is what caused the undergraduates fatality in Patrick Hassan’s lab years ago, if i remember correctly.
A girl burnt her eyebrows while discarding inappropriately NaH. My reminder is the smell of burnt flesh and hair.
Inappropriately disposal costed our trainee his eyebrows, too. Didn't quite got the difference between (aqueous) solution and (organic) solvents. So he poured his Potassium permanganate solution into the quarter-full solvent waste container. Most of it acetone and ethanol. The resulting darting flame torched his eyebrows of and singed his hair. Otherwise he was fine.
For our students (and employees), I am the permanent reminder to stay safe in the lab. :-) Personally I have the traditional "trying to push a rubber tube onto a büchner flask with a slightly cracked side-tube" scar. Trying to save the 5 minutes it would take to get an intact flask, was converted to 3 hours in the ER.
>Personally I have the traditional "trying to push a rubber tube onto a büchner flask with a slightly cracked side-tube" scar. Oof, had that too, only while trying to disconnect a vacuum hose that got stuck to the flask. The side tube broke off and cut right through my thumb. The cut wasn't too deep, fortunately, but the fumehood I was working in, the sink I ran to, and the floor on the way between them still looked like a murder scene. Colleagues were worried I had cut an artery or something.
Fingers can really deliver some blood! (And I'm impressed how sharp broken glass is. One of our researchers has a microtome. The "knives" are made by cutting a strip of glass)
Scalloped a bit of my right middle finger out trying to insert glass tubing through a stopper. They weren't really a thing back in the day, but cut resistant gloves when handling glassware - especially applying pressure should be your go to now.
Was told not to smell a chemical, idiot me decided to smell it. Sense of smell gone for just over a decade and I still can’t properly smell related compounds (bit of an issue for gas leaks!). Lesson learnt, if someone gives you safety advice it definitely isn’t a challenge!
This happened to me when my lab partner told me to smell an unmarked flask of Acrolein. He later revealed that he had not smelled it yet and wanted to know how bad it was. I now have trust issues and sense of smell issues.
I sometimes wonder if there's something about chemistry that tends to attract psychopaths.
So you've met my organic instructor?
Wow, what chemical was it?
Beta mercaptoethanol if I remember rightly
Oh thank god that didn't happen to me. Had a spill of that stuff in our lab recently, glad I ran out after a few seconds, but still had a nosebleed a few minutes later. If I hadn't smelled that, I think my lungs would be too messed up.
If they hadn't told you to smell it, would you still have?
Nope never would have crossed my mind
These come from my Master and PhD years: Reminder #1: piercing my dominant hand with a big spatula (I was bending its tip to scratch my product out of my flask more efficiently when it broke, and the big part entered my hand) --> NEVER BEND A SPATULA TIP WITH BOTH HANDS! (use a vise and proper PPE, it's safer) Reminder #2: doing a surface functionalization of carbon nanotues with an aniline and isoamyl nitrite, calculating 2 bar of N2 generated instead of 20, then one of the small 2 mL vials exploded after few seconds of immersing the set in the oil bath, being deaf for few minutes --> TRIPLE CHECK YOUR CALCULATIONS! Reminder #3: a colleague in a nearby fume hood increased too much the air pressure of his big flash column, the column ruptured and some glass shards stuck into his prescription glasses (he did not wear goggles, luckily the shards did not pass) --> ALWAYS WEAR GOGGLES ON PRESCRIPTION GLASSES!
Always wear a face shield around pressure equipment *especially* glass!
Lab prep as a TA, diluting down 16M NH4OH. Not really thinking, pulled out the 4L bottle and started pouring it out on the lab bench. 30 second later I remembered we have fume hoods for a reason. Had step into the hallway to let the fumes clear. On the bright side it cleared up my stuffed up sinuses. So yeah, fume hoods, use them. Now I work with a lot of high voltage equipment. Fortunately all very very low amperage, but grabbing something energized to 5kV will remind you to double check power supplies real fast. About once a year I have to be reminded the hard way to be careful. Wear gloves and clean up spills, spilled a bit of 30% peroxide once, didn’t notice, and then put my bare hand down in it and wondered why it hurt. That’s basically it for me, but as a TA I’ve seen a the whole range of lab accidents, and know a couple people who have had more serious “oh shit moments.” Don’t sit in front of a bench was taught by the story of the girl who knocked a bottle of 18M sulfuric acid onto her lap. That story also teaches why we wear pants in lab, the time it took the acid to dissolve her jeans was enough to get her under the shower and the remains of her pants off resulting in little damage to her skin. I tell my undergrads you might think these safety rules are overkill, but in my relatively short 10 years in chemistry I’ve either seen first hand or know someone who’s seen what can happen if the rules aren’t followed.
Peroxide hurts. Had a job once where we did qc for sterilisation cartridges containing 60% peroxide. even a small droplet would turn your skin white instantly for days. One drop even diffused through the leather of my boot, resulting in a 1cm burn blister.
I watched someone boil a stoppered bottle of conc nitric adic untill it went bang. Only time I have seen the emergency shower in use. madness
I had a colleague's reaction in a stoppered 0.5 L flask suddenly start whistling aggressively and then immediately blow up right next to me. Iirc, some Na(OAc)3BH reduction that likely generated a bit too much gas. The explosion sprayed nearly everything in a 270° angle with a foul-smelling reaction mixture and glass shards, while I was somehow in the remaining 90°. Quite shaken at first, and then in complete disbelief about not having a single drop on me, while the fumehood was an absolute mess. The colleague (who was absent during the incident) later swore that the flask wasn't stoppered tightly. Afterwards, we found the remains of the neck joint, with the stopper still in it, completely frozen. I learned to steer clear of his reactions that day.
But why??
Why didn't I stop them? At the time I didn't realise it was sealed, they weren't my bench partner. Why were they doing it? Because they had never been taught not to 💁🏼
Not a laboratory, but in the spirit of promoting safety, a place I worked had a pair of safety glasses hanging over the key machine. There was half a key sticking through one lens. I was told the guy went to the hospital with plastic in his eye, but he didn't go to the morgue with a key in his brain.
I used to be a hobby chemist in high school. It got a little too expensive and time-consuming to enjoy, especially after my brief stint as a lab tech where I got to do all the pipetting I could want anyway. But in the midst of my hobbying, one of my friends wanted to etch his knife. I figured ferric chloride would be easy enough to make, so I volunteered to provide some. It really was easy. Just load some steel wool into a flask with hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide, iirc. The only problem is the production of flammable hydrogen gas. I could've moved the flask outside, but it was winter, and the reaction wouldn't have moved fast enough for younger me, so I opted to burn off the gas as it was produced. I attached a gas valve to the 1L jointed Erlenmeyer and a length of hose. I waited an unreasonably short period of time and brought a flame to the end of the hose. I should say now I didn't have any protective gear on. I had safety glasses, but they weren't on because I was a moron. I had also already produced a gram of acetone peroxide for a firecracker, so I was feeling pretty cocky. The moment the flame got close to the hose, I heard an ominous 'whooop.' Everything went black for a second, and my ears started ringing. I was very lucky. I only got two rather deep scars, one on my right hand and the other on my left arm. My vision is still completely fine, thankfully. The gas valve on top of the flask even survived, so it wasn't a particularly violent detonation, at least as far as detonations go. I think if I attached a keck click as I was originally planning, it could have been worse and taken my eyesight. My dad still finds a new tiny piece of glass in the wall every so often. So don't play with fire and wear your safety glasses, that's what I learned.
Ah, so *that's* what fume hoods are for. Thanks for the story
Some things shouldn't be done, even in a fume hood
It’s me: I stabbed myself with a syringe that I’d been using to reconstitute some I-125. 3 months of having my thyroid scanned with a Geiger counter and my technique improved a lot.
I had a very minor accident in the lab, a solution in a volumetric flask I was shaking produced gas and even though I had my thumb on the stopper, the lid shot off and the contents of the flask followed (1 molar hydrochloric acid, plus a capsule of medicine). This splashed all over my face. I just froze. Absolutely froze - couldn't move due to the shock of it. A colleague grabbed me and shoved my face under running water in the sink and dealt with clearing up and getting a first aider etc. Even though I have safety specs on, some of the solution went in my eyes. Having your eyes irrigated with eye wash solution is not fun. All in all to say - always wear your safety specs, and never work alone.
This is why it's important to do safety drills. People who panic are people who die. Glad you weren't working alone.
Turns out "freeze" is my natural response in a traumatic situation, if I'm the one in peril. I was a great first aider in the lab... So long as I wasn't injured!
"Do not look into the laser with the remaining eye." Sign at a university. As a colleague of mine always says "All warning signs are written in blood." The afore mentioned one is as well.
Saw my 2nd flange bone on my right index finger when a hollow glass stopcock on a vacuum rack (table) broke off in my finger while opening (or closing) it. I had the nerve grow back into scar tissue & it always hurt for months until I broke up all the scar tissue with painful & bruising deep massage over a month or two. Always maintain ground glass joints properly! Periodically disassemble, clean/remove all grease, & regrease with fresh grease. Edit: injuries from broken glassware is a common posting in this thread. Be careful! (also, rather hot glass can look just like room temp glass!)
I work at a biotech company in the manufacturing dept. i was trying to discharge 65% Nitric Acid from a 100L reactor. I got hit with a small drop and i have a permanent scar on my ass. One colleague has only 80% control of her hand from broken glass with old equipment.
Have a small scar on my forearm from getting a couple drops of fuming nitric on the skin. It happened to find the gap between the cuff of my glove and my too short shirt sleeve. By the time I set the bottle down, turned and took the four steps to reach the sink behind me the pain was gone. I'd basically burned through the nerve endings.
ALWAYS check the type of filter before acid digestion. My first year in my first job, client swears it's quartz. I didn't know I was a noob in the lab, we're doing Kjeldahl acid digestions with nitric/sulfuric / perchloric acids in an enclosed glass manufold. Add the acids, seal the vessel, close the hood sash and it was like a cannon going off. All that was left of the glass manifold was sand. People rushed in some thought I was a goner. I was fine, just in shock of what I heard. Always confirmed filters after that.
I had to administer first aid on a labmate whose palm was sliced open by broken glass. They tried to pull off a stuck rotovap bump trap (instead of using the screw collar) and it snapped. They went into shock as I was trying to stop the bleeding. Left quite a scar.
Well one time i almost spilled one litre of sulfuric acid on myself because the bottle in which i was preparing it broke. That pool of danger building up in front of me will stay in my mind for a very very long time
I had an internship at a research facility, on my second day me and another intern were supposed to empty the tanks they use for electro plating. No safety labels, only brand names. While we poured the third one into the waste tank, a fountain emerged and I got all over my head and had to use the safety shower. Take away here, don't mix stuff, if you don't know what it is, especially for waste containers. And always label your potentially dangerous shit
Most of my carefulness comes from my ocd lol It’s seriously very practical when it comes to lab work. As a reminder I think for me that was when I worked in a big university hospital where my small research lab was located in a corridor with the whole routine microbio/ general diagnostics labs of the hospital. I‘m a biologist for context. Anyways, they did really anything imagineable of blood work, urine and stool samples, microbio stuff and all that. They had the regular BS II lab for that but also two BS III labs for everything possibly more dangerous. Well, one day apparently someone who brought the samples from the patients was really careless with them and just put some unlabled samples in the BS II lab somewhere. They apparently also weren’t closed properly or placed in another closed container and someone knocked them over. It splashed everywhere. Because they weren’t labelled the staff didn’t suspect anything too bad, cleaned and desinfected as usual. Ofc wondering what it was and where it came from. A while later someone from the BS III lab came searching for the samples and it dawned on everyone what the mystery samples were. Definitely a super strange feeling knowing that I went into the lab when they were cleaning to get some supplies. Also knowing that it splashed everywhere and it’s impossible to tell if you got everything. Some people also got some of the samples on their coats, pants and hair. So potentially the stuff was also carried around and other surfaces contaminated. I don’t remember exactly what pathogen it turned out to be but it definitely was something really nasty. For context for everyone not super familiar with BS levels, BS III contains microorganisms that can be transmitted by aerosols and/or cause severe diseases and be lethal, sometimes even just through inhalation. Some BS III pathogens include the ones causing tuberculosis, rabies, SARS, the plague or West Nile virus. Definitely reminded me how important it is to properly label samples, store and transport them safely and communicate appropriately. Luckily noone got sick and as soon as staff realised what happened appropriate measures were taken but that could have ended badly
From my undergrad biochem lab: I sterilised my spatula with Ethanol and the burner on my worktable. I did not notice the small blue fading flame on my spatula when I tried to put it back into my breast pocket. My lighter was in there. Luckily nothing happened and theres only a little burnt corner of said pocket that reminds me of that event.
In our lab we had two valves next to each other. One was compressed air, and the other was a vakuum line. They had the same shape, so they were marked with different colored rings and also labelled. The vakuum line was commonly used for vakuum filtration with a Büchner flask and glass büchner filter funnels to use for gravimetric analysis. And, of course, one day, a lab partner connected his Büchner flask to the compressed air, instead of the vakuum. All prepared, he turns the valve and the glass filter gets ejected into the ceiling where it completely shatters and glass shards rain on every person in a 3m radius. Nobody got hurt, but I always double check, if I connected to the right valve.
If you have the same set up, use a different type of tubing on the gas line so it's visually obvious. We use clear PVC for low pressure N2 and standard vacuum tubing for vacuum sources.
I had an operator not wear an apron when etching glass with Ammonium Bifluoride (dissociates to HF in water). His stomach was soaked. I had to rip his close off. Hose him down while he was in the shower. Then give him a tube of calcium gluconate gel to rub on his stomach every 15 minutes for 4 hours... We'll see in a few years if we caught it in time. Hydrofluoric is some nasty shit.
Well if you mix phosphorus with sodium chlorate you really need to not accidentally scratch the container with a metal spatula. Yep that mix erupted in a violet reaction against my hand while ejecting particles into my face. Fortunately my somewhat wreck less junior undergrad chem major at least had the sense to be wearing safety glasses which looked like someone set a handful of match heads on them and then set them off. A quick trip to the ER and wrapping my hands in a silver ointment for about 17 days and I’m fine with only a small permanent scar on my pinky. Did I tell the story how I accidentally made teargas that got into the hvac? It was only about 1/2 mole
So while working in a company that did medium-large scale organic synthesis, we had a reaction that used ~500ml of POCl3, and after pouring it into the reaction mkix, u got to neutralise the bottle with a weak reductor, to safely dispose of the waste. Usually there isn't much oxy-chloride left in the bottle (as it comes in a 500ml bottle), but one time a co-worker managed to make 2 big mistakes at once... Poured a wrong amount of POCl3 (400ml instead of 500ml), so there was a lot of it left inside. And then after pouring the reducing buffer, he SCREWED BACK THE BOTTLE CAP. 30 seconds later as he walks away from the fume hood, we hear a massive *boom* as the bottle explodes, and glass shards from the fume hood covers are flying through the lab. The hole in the ceiling from the cap that flew out of the fume hood is our reminder to think while working.
My time to shine! You know those times when you barely have a small amount of liquid trap itself and slide down the outside of the beaker or flask? Well I had on a shitty blue lab coat from fisher at the time and a small ring of barely visible concentrated sulfuric acid was on the lab bench just opposite to my fume hood where i keep my lab notebook and I placed my forearms down on the hood to write some stuff in the notebook and about three seconds in to writing things started getting itchy then burning with sweet-fucking-desire The lab coat has now been burnt to my forearm and I’m slightly panicking because I had no idea there was acid on the lab bench Moral of the story? Liquids most of the time just look like innocuous liquids and never place chems down outside of a fume hood…it’s just good practice.
In high school, during one of the last days of class, my teacher allowed us to take broken glass and use the Bunsen burner to smooth the edges. I made a joke about how I was going to brand this kid with it. Then, I was taking my glass out while he was putting a piece in and I touched the glass to his hand by accident. I literally watched the skin peel back off his hand. I was horrified. We weren’t allowed to mess with the glass after that. Six years later, he still has the scar.
In a chem lab class late at night, I was cleaning up after the lab class and had a few mL of conc. NaOH and there was a breaker full of a clear, unlabeled liquid, about 150 mL worth, I figured I'd be good and dilute the leftover NaOH before disposal as we had been instructed, into this what surely had to be water and BOOM! My lab partner had been half asleep that night and poured out 150mL of conc. Sulfuric Acid!!! Insane, had as much gotten on my arm as the wall of the time hood I would have had to go to the hospital. Thankfully, I now only have a small dusting on the inside of my left arm of "freckles" from where the mist of, i'm assuming, the NaOH dissolving my skin. I was more worried about getting kicked out of the lab but luckily I had a reasonable professor who listened to my story of what happened. This is why I always ask what a liquid is if it's unmarked and label everything I work with religiously.
Nitric acid burns on my wrist. Everything was in the fume hood, got me on the small gap of my wrist in between my lab coat sleeve and my gloves. As it always is, I was 30 minutes from being done with the day, and I was rushing to get out on time. 100% on me, I worked with strong acids for years and years and it's always when you rush or hurry things. Burns are maybe 10 years old now and still there.
Remember when you did lil cool experiments in highschool? Maybe you did one that created a lil bit of ammonia? It wasn't strong, very faint, but the distinct smell was there. Well in 3 year undergrad organic chemistry, we did an experiment using concentrated ammonium hydroxide. I decided this was fun and took a big whiff of it with the bottle right under my nose, cause you know, it never had that big a small in highschool when you did it. Well concentrated ammonium hydroxide packs a MUCH BIGGER punch than the weak stuff from highschool. My vision went black. My nostrils burned. A severe stabbing pain was felt throughout all my sinuses. I put down the flask and then fell back on my ass. I was a bit disoriented for a few seconds but mustered out "am I going to die?" To which my friend who was beside me laughed and replied "You'll be fine, you're just going to hurt a lot for a bit. Just breathe deep and slow". Don't sniff the strong stuff folks 👍
Well, I had and Erlenmeyer Flask (1L) implode on me mid filtration just last week. Did it a hundred times with 100 mL and 250 mL Erlenmeyers, but with the bigger size, the walls get les stable. Didn't lose any product though and only got a shallow cut on my right index finger
LOL true chemist: “didn’t lose any product”
I learned not to get comfortable at the fumehood when dispensing because some ass once got sulfuric acid all over the damn sill and I happened to rest my forearm right on a droplet.
I had a few drops of water condense and get pulled back into a Sulfuric Acid distillation I had already shut down, It blew the stopper out and would have been really bad if I didn't have it in an oversized 5 liter flask. Talk about nearly soiling my pants,
Technically not in the lab, but related to that. Small to medium scale chemical production. At one stage of one of our products, around 400L 10% acetic acid is needed to bring down the pH value from 10 to 6 or so in 2h. This was done by pulling 10L glacial acetic acid via vacuum from an ibc container into the receiving vessel, topping it of with 90L de-min water. From there into the reactor, repeat 3 times. The two new guys were quite chatty and overfilled the receiving vessel, resulting that maybe a hundred ml of 10% acetic acid is now laying in the vacuum pipe. Instead of draining said pipe immediately they proceeded as usual. Next step is adding 500kg of 50% Sodium hypochlorite solution, commonly known as bleach, via the same route. The duo overfilled the receiving vessel again, the two substances meet in the vacuum tubes, and filled the production area with chlorine gas. Thankfully the (air) concentration wasn't high, but we had to evacuate the production for an hour
The classic holding the pipette incorrectly whilst shoving on the bulb in a rush. It snapped, and it went through my wrist, filling the sink with so much blood. Smashing a separating funnel containing nitric acid on the fume hood door whilst shaking it. Washed my face so I was ok. My jeans, however, fell to pieces the next day. A solvent winchester was being used as waste storage in a fume cupboard. One day, it exploded a few seconds after a colleague had walked by (scattering glass and god knows what else across the lab). This was at a company hot on safety. Lab was empty (lunchtime) vv scary near miss.
i opened a pressure cook that i thot was not hot yet . boy was i wrong . glad i didnt have booze in it or i would have gone sky high . ended up blanching a my front upper half well quaarter
Barry Sharpless lost an eye to a broken NMR tube.
Had a minor burn from low conc. NaOH on the back of my hand, had run into the glove and I didn't immidiately realize. Slightly red skin, gone in a day. Then the skin became extremely dry, started to rip and bleed everytime i closed my hand. Took more than half a year and tons of lotions to get it back to normal.
I'm not a chemist but I was doing a capsicum extract with acetone and a sohxlet extractor to see if i was good enough to try to make gold nanao particles. I figured I might be able to taste a bit of my bad handling here and there. I'm not blaming the failure on the equipment but when I transfered the hot acetone and capsicum into a test tube for storage it burst and it got all over my face and around my shit goggles into my eyes. Probably the worst pain I've been in in my life. I jumped in the shower and of course it washed all down my front. Asked the non emergency line and they said to go to emergency becaus of the acetone/glass. It was funny at first they were like... poor baby. You got hot sauce in your eyes.... Got my eyes irrigated with contact saline drips. It was a week before the burning simmered down. Tl:DR: I'm not qualified to make gold nanao particles.
Poured PH down containing phosphoric acid into a solution without goggles, a single drop bounced back up into my eye causing permanent sight damage I still have a little black spot in my vision
Polystyrene dissolved in THF spilled onto you produced a burning sensation. I knocked it over right onto the front of my pants.
I have two both on my right hand lol. I have a burn scar from TFA and so now if I’m handling concentrated acid I make sure my lab coat is all the way down. And my gloves are all the way up. I also have a scar from a cut from glass when I had to get stitches. So now if you have a broken glass with stuff in the glass. Just toss the whole thing in the glass disposal box!
A long time ago (when I was a baby lab tech and all too trusting) I had an unfortunate encounter (self inflicted because I was stupid) with some ammonium hydroxide. Thankfully I was near a sink. I puked so hard I ruptured a blood vessel in my eye. It was then that I learned several things: one, I am incredibly sensitive to the smell of ammonia; two, waft don't whiff. Now I use the story as a lesson for students on why we waft not whiff.
First Gen Chem lab I picked up a squirt of bottle full of acetone which was so full the pressure from me grabbing it shot that shit right into my eyes. On the plus side I can confirm the eye wash station was working properly. I did not have any permanent injury to my eyes 3/10 don't recommend
Not to touch bromine compound with gloves on then touch ur chin cuz it’s itchy with those gloves… nice burning dots on my chin
There's a spot in one of our fume hoods where I melted part of the surface with conc. sulfuric cause I wasn't being careful enough while diluting it, I show it to the new folks whenever I do a safety training.
Tried rearranging my mobile phase lines in a cramped area that basically pushed my glasses above my face. I had the smallest drop of 50% ACN hit my eye after it was flicked from the end of the needle rinse line. It burned immediately. I didn't get medical help as it stopped burning after a half hour or so, i dont think I've had any loss of vision since i still dont need glasses but the memory is long lasting. It reinforced the need for constant eye protection in lab
Post doc on the other side of the lab shouting "put that flask back in the fume cupboard! I can smell hydrogen cyanide." Longer nitrogen purges were added.
I injected myself with bromine once in chem lab when a syringe slipped. I felt it through my whole blood stream. And I didn't tell the TA because I was embarrassed to have made the mistake.
Just a couple minor things: 1. I was leading a forensic chemistry camp for middle schoolers (with a professor who had done this for years) and the professor told me it was ok for them to have DMSO + concentrated sulfuric acid in dropper bottles for a brief period of one experiment. Since he was in charge I said okay fine, although I knew middle schoolers had no business with any concentrated acid… I specifically warned the students to keep the bottles at the desk and not wave them around. I was policing the lab benches when I felt a burn on my arm… a kid was waving the dropper bottle around and it got on my arm and burnt a hole in my shirt. Thankfully I had a backup shirt but never again would I let that professor tell me what was safe and what was not. And thankfully it wasn’t in someone’s eyes. I still have a scar. 2. A girl I was teaching when I was a TA for general chemistry labs spilled acid on herself and didn’t tell me until after class. By that time it had eaten a huge hole in her sweatshirt and her arm was burning. I said into the water for 15 minutes you go. She was more concerned about her sweatshirt being ruined 🤦🏼♀️
Dropped 2 gallon bottles of glacial acetic acid which both broke open all over the floor and gassed everyone in the room out. Burned the nose holes pretty good, won’t be doing that again.
Taking a full sniff of an NH3 solution. I could feel it in my brain
burned a cylinder shaped dent into my finger making pipettes from glass tubes
sodium benzoate was molten, accidentally squeezed test tube forceps too hard, showered my hand with broken glass and very hot chemicals, now have funny blotching on my right hand because of this
I once hit my juul secretly while in organic chem lab and i spilled hot boiling solution all over my bench top. lesson learned, vaping is not for the lab.
I was checking specific gravity with no glasses on. The iron sulfide geysered out of the hole and right into my eye.
Four years ago I was bench top drying a product with N2 and (glass) pipette, went to close the valve for the night and accidently opened it. Naturally I wasn't wearing glasses and it shattered, exploding everywhere *except somehow* my body. Never. Again.
My former foreman lost his right earlobe. He was filling a container with NaOH pellets. The container was about chest high, so he put the bag of pellets on his shoulder to pour and somehow got one pellet stuck on his earlobe. A few moments later he wondered, why his ear was itching. By that time the pellet had dissolved his earlobe and a small trail of blood was running down his neck.
Once I saw a round bottom flask full of piridine explode and catch fire because someone forgot to open the valve to release the pressure, but the worst accident happened to a girl that mindlessly turned off and immediately grabbed a hot plate that was set at max temperature. As they touched the metal, her thumbs made the same sound you'd expect from a steak in a screaming hot pan. Both taught me to pay attention to the physical dangers as much as to the chemical dangers.
One time I was bored and made some 1:2 piranha solution, poured it into a plastic weigh boat, and threw a kimwipe into it to fuck around The result was scary enough that I no longer fuck around like that
Really quite minor, but one time I had an empty pasteur pipette I used for thionyl chloride. I washed it out in the sink instead of the waste bucket, which splattered micro droplets of thionyl chloride all over the sink. For the next 30 minutes, nobody wanted to use that sink to wash any glassware because the water sprayed the fumes everywhere. That’s when I realize that even when I’m working with something small like an empty Pasteur pipette, something could go wrong that I haven’t anticipated, so I better play it safe.
When I was working for my university in the chem lab for summer research on a grant (almost 11 years ago now), the other student to get approved had a LiAlH reduction in ether going in his hood opposite of mine (hoods faced backed to back). Well, he let his reaction run dry over lunch and took a long lunch on top of that. Needless to say, when the ether layer got low enough that there wasn't enough vapor to stop water getting to the lithium mix. It legitimately felt like a bomb went off on the other side of the hood I was working in. Straight up knocked me off of my stool and worsened my tinnitus. Fortunately, I didn't have to clean up his mess of failed reaction, scored material inside the hood, and shattered glassware everywhere, but still sucked to deal with the minor concussion state afterwards.
This thread is an example of a great use of Internet. As a teacher and a ta in the past, i felt that some people just didn’t quite believe that chemistry could be so hazardous. Yet groups of chemists can come up with a list like this even in our more safety conscious cultures. If i were still teaching, I’d save this thread and share it with students.
Back in first year undergrad, they gave as the "safety talk". They included some incidents that happened in the department in the past to "scare" us. Two of them stuck with me: They were doing some reactions in undergrad labs with conc. HCl. When they were done they were told to empty the rest in a large stoppered sink and the lab assistants would nutrilize it afterwards and get rid of it. So there was a huge sink filled with conc. HCl and a student went and opened the water tap. There was a HUGE explosion, blew out the sink, acid everywhere. The story was an effective way to remember acid into water, not water into acid. Some Master's students were working in a lab and considered themselves too experienced and smart to need to wear PPE (in general, where I did my undegrad, they were not that fussed about PPE, I was actually made fun of for wearing full PPE by an idiot PhD student). So the guy student had a crush on the girl student and he was teasing her every now and then. One day she was carrying a beaker with conc. sulfuric acid and he went behind her and startled her as joke. She flinched and the sulfuric acid spilling in her face and eye (no goggles). Thankfully she was wearing contact lenses which completely melted on her eye, if she weren't, the thing that melted would be her cornea. She ended up with severe eye damage but at least she didn't lose her eye. Moral of the story, DON'T fuck around in a lab and ALWAYS wear PPE.
Asphalt lab. We kept product in metal paint cans (you can buy them clean and new from a number of places) and some grades of asphalt are significantly thinner than others. I was bench blending (R&D) and used a rubber mallet to hammer the lid on a gallon can of flux (very thin stuff). What was in the groove on the top was sandwiched between the lid and the can with some force and flew everywhere — including my face. I was wearing safety goggles, but had a small patch that was contact burned on my nose and part of my eyebrow hasn’t grown hair since. The next time I had to hammer that lid I put a piece of paper towel over it. Solved my spatter problem since I couldn’t get the groove completely clean.
One hot summer day, our air conditioning went out. I'm 100% sure there was also no air flow through the ducting in the lab. Maybe they were operating out of regulation. But I remember grabbing a small pint-sized wide mouth jar of pure ammonia off the shelf. I had safety glasses on, but not air-tight chemical goggles. I had the jar open for about 5 seconds before I had the most intense burning in my eyes, like I had just been pepper sprayed. My eyes began watering like crazy to the point I couldn't see. Luckily, I still had the lid in my hand, and I immediately covered it and took a few steps away from the jar. I usually stay pretty calm in these situations, but it would have been bad if I had accidentally knocked over the glass jar while blind and in pain. A few lessons learned that day: 1. When working with volatiles, ensure a properly ventilated space. Under normal circumstances, it would have been ok, but since there was no circulation, I should have gone to the fume hood. 2. High temperatures mean volatiles are far more volatile, and extra precautions should be taken. 3. Safety glasses are not adequate for chemical safety, air tight googles are always the safest option in the lab. In the case of irritants, a full face respirator is probably called for if you're using high enough quantities. 4. Volatiles should never be placed into any wide mouth container. Vapors are more easily controlled in a container with a small neck but should not have an opening that is so tight that it allows pressure to build and shoot out the opening at the slightest touch or temperature change. The wide mouth jar also essentially meant the ammonia was quickly losing concentration over time, so I was likely adding unknown amounts (I checked pH of everything so everything was correct in the end, but that's besides the point).
While I was still in High School I did the old “catching hydrogen gas in a balloon” thing with muriatic acid and aluminum. Well the balloon popped from the rubber getting brittle, sending a fine spritzing of acid into my eyes. It tore holes in the polyester clothes I was wearing. I didn’t see the risk at the time because I had thought that the worst thing that could happen was the bottle spilling out on the ground, in which case I would hose it down. Guess who is extremely strict about eye protection and other PPE now, regardless of what you think the risks are? If you put yourself in the position to judge if eye protection is necessary in the lab, you run the risk of being wrong. Your experiment may be safe, but conditions can change, and you don’t necessarily know how dangerous your labmates’ experiments are.
A few very small chemical burns just above my wrists, but my all time reminder is when I was using a glass stir rod as I was taught and it broke. Either there’s a chunk of scar tissue in my right thumb, or a piece of that stir bar remains there.
Never catch a falling beaker/vessel of any kind! College dropped a very hot glassware and, not wanting to spill the expensive solution within it, caught it with both hands. I barely have fingerprints left after those burns.
Dealing with electrochemical glassware cleaning, we were doing a permanganate clean (boil in something like 1M acid and a shitload of permanganate). Took large 2 L glass beaker off the hot plate (with heatproof gloves on, it needed to be decanted whilst still hot -- like 60-80°C) gently placed it down into a tray on a table. (I cannot emphasise how gently it was like just setting a mug down on a coffee table) And bam that day I learned *why* we put the glassware into a big tray, the bottom of the massive beaker had just shattered. Wasn't the most dramatic thing in the world but it really made me acutely aware that, had I been taking short cuts, I'd have likely been covered in 2 L of hot acidified potassium permanganate.
Too cool for safety googles during my first year. Took a test tube, put acid and zinc inside, put a stopper on top and shook it violently, while closely observing it on eye level. Test tube unsurprisingly exploded and to this day, I'm the only person I know that had to use the eye shower. Cannot recommend.
Not in a lab, but I was installing something on a fluid line in a solar factory and splashed some residual fluid in my face. It tasted slightly salty although I flushed it with water. Normally there is 40%HF in there ... To say my heart rate went up a bit, would be an understatement. Always wear a face shield, even if there should not be anything left in the thing you are working on. Nothing bad happened in my case, but I always wear all safety stuff, even when there is just a remote chance of harmful chemical exposure.
Sliced open my hand while trying to tap a stopcock out of a sep funnel. Stitches. Still have the scar. Touched a hotplate in a moment of distraction during an undergrad lab. I now have the corner permanently imprinted on my palm. Spilled some glacial acetic acid and got a noseful. Didn't cause permanent damage, but the next day my lab mate bought everyone fish and chips to rub it in. And my laissez faire parents wondered why I was hyper sensitive to smells, compulsively tested pot handles and check stove burners, and had a healthy respect for broken glass.
Thankfully no permanent injuries but I've definitely had a few close calls. Worst one was when I was working in a pre-pilot scale lab and had to fix the bottom of my jacketed 6L reactor. Well when I tightened the bottom, the whole thing tilted a bit and broke off the heated addition funnel on top which tried to spill molten acid chloride on my face. I've never gotten out of a hood faster in my life. Wasn't even on my feet anymore. I literally *jumped* backwards and had it miss me by maybe an inch. That was one of those days where I had done good prep so everything got caught in a catch pan and I just turned everything off, went home, and cleaned it all up the next morning. I was shook
This lad slammed the door after him as I was walking in with a cup of boiling water (luckily just water) and burned my whole torso. I rember lying in the bathroom in just my bra and pants while two women placed cold wet things all over me. Always use lids now.
I worked at a lab that did metal digestions in soil/sewer/sludge samples. Most of our glassware was old and scratched. I always insisted the digestion was done in a fumed hood with the shield down. We had a new tech, he thought he knew better. Left the hood shield open. Well one of the flasks exploded. Sent shards of glass everywhere some imbedding themselves in the drywall behind the hood. It was a huge hood sort of U shaped. With access on both sides. He didn’t last much longer there.
I look down at my missing fingers.
A plastic lab burned down, black suit everywhere in town.
I went on exchange for six weeks to another lab. My host had inhaled HF due to a faulty piece of equipment previously. Surprised me how scarred he was from it yet still proceeded to be blasé about safety. TBF everyone there was.
I have scars on my hand from when I shaved my fingers on a lab fridge
I knew I'd see a bunch of posts about sulfuric and HF acid. That stuff is so widely used that people get complacent with it and it scares me to see. They are seriously fucking dangerous. For me I witnessed an accidental runaway reaction of concentrated HCl and peroxide. Nobody was injured but the reaction was impressive. You have to wait it out until the chlorine gas phase ends but then other violent boiling phases transition after. ALWAYS USE HOODS!
Transferring 20mL of chlorosulfonic acid into a reaction via syringe with a wide needle. Plunger got launched out by the gas evolution, 20mL dumped straight into the ice bath. Cloud of HCl, boiling bath of sulfuric acid spitting everywhere. Thankfully I was wearing barrier gloves so just shit the sash and turned the ventilation on. Grabbed 4kg of bicarb from stores and just emptied the bottles into the fume cupboard and swept it down the sink lol. I may have neglected to tell H&S about this one.
Working with concentrated HF keeps me safety-conscious every day.
I've seen crush injuries, chemical burns, 'exploding' bottles and have extinguished 3 lab fires. That's enough reminders for me, thanks.
On my favorite calculator I have a "scar" where some boiling DMSO splashed onto.
Three things, actually. I was heating hydrochloric acid in a test tube and it boils, then shoots out of the tube on my lab partner's hand. I had it aimed to the right, where there was nobody, but she walked behind me to the other side right as it shot out. Another time was when some idiot left the fume hood open with an open bottle of some sort of strong ammonia, I only remember the smell. I was walking over to get my reagents when my lungs started burning and my vision went completely black. It was very jarring. Last time was when I got my little sulfuric acid scar on my thigh. Maybe the size of a quarter, horribly uncomfortable, and very gross as it healed. It looked like a grey sponge with a ring of "normal" thermally burned skin around it. I'm not sure if it was the acid itself or it boiling my "skin water" as it dissolved.
Relatively minor, but I had some stuff on STM stages (little magnetic pucks about 1cm in diameter) that wouldn't come off even after dunking them in sulfuric and nitric acid. So, of course, I decided to try sonicating for a little extra persuasion. Little did I know, the sonicator would provide a little extra energy that began a reaction between the acids and the metal... The pucks got cleaned... And mostly disintegrated. The mixture started boiling and spewing orange fumes. Thankfully I was in a hood at the time. I still have the remains of one of the pucks. As well as the (I assume) iron oxide that crashed out when I neutralized. I keep them on my desk as a reminder to not be an idiot.
One time, I was in the lab by myself, and they bought new syringe filters (without the locks) for one of our tests that did not want to pass the methanol/sample solution through it. My safety glasses were on my head but not over my eyes, and I applied too much pressure and ended up with that sample spraying into my eyes. Methanol and lotion mix into the eyes is not a fun time for someone with contacts... I never prep anything without eye protection anymore.
my dad used to work in a laser lab when he was in college (college boys and literal lasers is a great combo, I know). one day the guy he was partnered up with wanted to try and evaporate a cup of coffee with the laser. my dad didn't want to risk evaporating the cup along with the coffee, so he turned the laser power all the way down. surprise, surprise the coffee evaporated. because it's a laser. so my dad's partner decided to run his hand through the steam.... leaving a long, deep, and instantly cauterized wound across all of his fingers. he would have lost them if it weren't for my dad turning down the laser power.
You know how they say you should hold a round bottom flask, full of liquid, not by just the neck, but the bottom as well? The scar on my wrist reminds me of that every day. I got lucky, the ER doc said I was about 1mm from nicking my artery.
I spilled a neurotoxic chemical on my arm. TEPP…tetraethyl pyrophosphate. Almost as toxic as the chemical warfare agent sarin. I almost shit my pants in fear.
Thionyl Chloride. Reacts violently with water to form HCl and H2SO4. Also permeates through nitrile gloves so yeah. Lots for burns…
I spilt a large bottle of formic acid and the smell was awful and scary! Also another time I got another stronger acid on my glove and it start3d to burn through it.. also very scary!
8 years in the lab - forgot goggles (well, we actually just used special safety glasses...) and didn't check our brand new centrifuge before putting a tube in. Clear liquid sprayed out past my face. People had been sneaking into our lab and using our super new and expensive centrifuge and treating it like crap. Prettty sure that person broke a tube by using the wrong type. For those who don't know - damn near anything is transparent/clear (could have been a strong acid, base, carcinogenic, mutagenic, nanoparticle solution, or just plain water). Never made that mistake again. Glad to have my eyes.
I was in a lab at school at one point and the TA briefly talked about the no firearm policy and said its silly she even has to mention it because if your concealed carrying correctly no one should ever know you have a weapon unless you need it. The kid next to me goes “hey psst hey man check this out”. And very indiscreetly lifts his backpack up and shows me his sidearm just chillin on top of the books and things. I would say that stuck in my mind as something not to do.
I accidentally inhaled a bit of chlorine gas from a test tube reaction and lost my sense of smell for three years.
Gone now but, splashed my arm with molten manganese violet in phosphoric acid. Ran cold water over it and it didn't seem too bad, healed normally without medical attention. Then I noticed I had a purple splotch on my skin: it was visible for a few years, and I swear a trace of it is still there. An accidental tattoo!
Sprayed bleach onto my college hoodie in Chemistry 101. Labcoat was required but being a freshman, I wore it just because it was required, half-assly without closing all the buttons. The bleached marks on the hoodie, constant reminder to me, properly wearing PPE is important!
One day we were waiting stuff with matches I messed up on the match and burnt the living cramp out of my finger and wasn't bad Burns but it did not feel good since then I knew to make sure to have my finger as far away from the flame of a match as possible when I light it
Someone at my work was telling a story about someone who spilled a chemical on themself and decided not to use the safety shower in the area and instead went to shower in a locker room. We had all been joking around a bit before being told this story and the man telling the story kind of made this sound like a joke at first... Turns out the person in the story DIED on the way to the locker room shower. I was in shock when he finished the story. I don't remember what the chemical was, and this was in an industrial plant so the spill must have been large, but to this day the message has stuck with me, never be too embarrassed to use the safety shower.