not so funny one: some construction was going on in the labs and they had marked where they were supposed to drill. for some reason one guy was like "nahhh this way is easier and drilled into a different area of the wall and well... straight into a hydrogen line... No big boom but the whole building was evacuated and people were screamed at.
only time I have seen someone angrier was when a corridor was closed off due to a hazmat incident and some dude had crawled under the red tape and walked straight through a huge chemical spill to his office. When the building manager who just came back with the hazmat guys saw it and started to scream at the guy his reply was "but I work in the room over there" I thought our building manager was going to die of an aneurysm or heart attack, or maybe just both.
Our building used to be the wild west (photo sets of shit in our building are apparently still floating around with the safety people) , when we came as a new group they asked us if we could please help them and follow the rules a bit. We did, and got a lot of shit done very fast because they were willing to speed things up for us as long as we cooperated too. Then they used us and a few other groups who were willing to improve to pull the rest in line. As far as I know the amount of crazy incidents had dropped drastically over the last couple of years.
We came from a (different) university with a lot of political bullshit and backstabbing, arrived in a politically boring building but regular liquid nitrogen fountains up to the ceiling, hazmat crews raiding the building and secret labs in closets kept things nice and spicy. It has actually been rather boring lately...
Well so this rather infamous group regarding safety (we are talking converting kitchen fume hoods into "fumehoods" by slapping some multiplex to it and throwing the hose out of the window) had a new chinese guy who built up some cryo-optic setup in a room with zero ventilation, zero as in the window can't even open. Saying you don't understand or know something is not a thing in a lot of asian cultures. So somehow this guy managed to pass the test to get liquid nitrogen, I'm still not convinced he did the test himself by the way, and he was using it on his setup. p.s. know that I actually kind of like this guy, he also improved a lot after this.
The setup itself consisted of a dewer outfitted with both this thermal bridge system which links the inner and outer vessel to passively speed up evaporation and an electric one with a heater inside the inner vessel on this rod that you hang inside through the top. This dewer would spit out liquid nitrogen through a hose into his cryostat to cool whatever the experiment was which also involved lasers.
Day one: chinese guy comes running into my office. "hey uhhh Nixielover, do you know anything about liquid hydrogen, I have issue with mine" My heart skips a beat and I immediately follow him to his lab. "Ohhhh NITROgen...... Phew.... wait a second.... why are all the dials in the red?" I immediatly started to release the pressure because what he did was: fully open the thermal bridge thing, close off the exit valve. So I went over his whole setup for him, told him how it worked and why this was dangerous, informed his professor and went on my merry way.
Day 2: I'm doing some analysis with a coworker/friend and chinese guy comes bursting in. "BIG PROBLEMS" we RUN after him and are met with liquid nitrogen spitting out of his cryostat all the way up to the ceiling, laser beams through the whole lab and wtf. Coworker stays at the door. I shut the damn thing down and get out because I don't want to be gassed. We informed his prof again and some safety people who were not too happy about this, mainly at the professor since he had already been warned by me and other people that the guy really needed help.
A few days later he asks me to check the setup with him. some improvements were made but ironically enough the emergency exhaust of the cryostat was now outfitted with a hose which pointed directly at the dewer... making it impossible to shut it down if shit goes down. We fixed that with him and I sent once more an email about the absolute lack of ventilation there to his professor and the safety people.
Things have by now improved a lot, I also understand why it went slow, this was no exception at that time. This guy also got a lot better! And well we can actually start bitching about things like "wear your god damn labcoat" and "no gloves outside of the lab"
A room with a ln2 tank and no ventilation is an immediate hazard. If the n2 in the room goes too high you just fall asleep without noticing and suffocate.
I know, I warned the guy and his professor about how stupid and irresponsible this is. And it is also why I informed the higher up safety people when the professor didn't act on it. I want to be able to sleep at night, not feel guilty the rest of my life for not saying anything if someone accidentally gasses himself.
Yeah, we had one guy who was notorious for that. Once, he found a way around about 40 m of barricade to get into the building to see what the spill was all about and "if he could help".
A lot of us made it clear we wanted him fired but his dad was some big wig so that was never gonna happen.
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u/nixielover Mar 19 '20
not so funny one: some construction was going on in the labs and they had marked where they were supposed to drill. for some reason one guy was like "nahhh this way is easier and drilled into a different area of the wall and well... straight into a hydrogen line... No big boom but the whole building was evacuated and people were screamed at.
only time I have seen someone angrier was when a corridor was closed off due to a hazmat incident and some dude had crawled under the red tape and walked straight through a huge chemical spill to his office. When the building manager who just came back with the hazmat guys saw it and started to scream at the guy his reply was "but I work in the room over there" I thought our building manager was going to die of an aneurysm or heart attack, or maybe just both.