Charges in the TMS Diazomethane Case
Readers may remember the case of Ronald Daigle, who died of exposure to TMS diazomethane a couple of years ago in Nova Scotia. Sepracor, the company who owned the facility at the time, has now pleaded...
View ArticleThe UCLA Lab Fatality: Criminal Charges Filed
Most readers here will remember the fatal lab accident at UCLA in 2009 involving t-butyllithium, which took the life of graduate student Sheri Sangji. Well, there’s a new sequel to that: the professor...
View ArticlePotassium Hydride Is Not Your Friend
Noted chem-blogger Milkshake seems to have had a close call with a fire started by a tiny potassium hydride residue. It looks like he made it through without serious injury, but that sort of thing will...
View ArticleImidazole-1-Sulfonyl Azide HCl: Look Out
I don’t know how many of you out there like to form azides, but if you do, you’ve probably used (or thought about using) imidazole-1-sulfonyl azide hydrochloride. This reagent appeared in Organic...
View ArticleThe Sangji/UCLA/Harran Case: Now Officially a Mess
There have been a number of odd developments in the Sheri Sangji case, the lab fatality at UCLA that led to criminal charges being filed against both Prof. Patrick Harran and the university. The Doing...
View ArticleAccident Report, or One Damn Thing After Another
I have this from a lab-accidents-I-have-known discussion over on Reddit. It is, of course, unverified, but it’s depressingly plausible. As a chemist, this one is guaranteed to make you bury your head...
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Safety Warning: Togni’s Reagents
Some of you may have used the second Togni reagent (shown) as a trifluoromethylating agent. Well, there’s a new paper in Organic Process R&D that brings word that it’s an explosive hazard. A group...
View ArticleFatalities at DuPont
As many readers will have heard, there was a fatal accident at a DuPont plant in the Houston area over the weekend. Four workers were killed by methyl mercaptan (methanethiol), and here’s more on what...
View ArticleHow Not to Do It: NMR Magnets
Here’s an NMR imaging blog with details of a recent problem in an Indian facility. Two people ended up stuck to the machine, pinned by an oxygen cylinder (!) that one of them brought into the room....
View ArticleTMS Azide Explosions
There’s been a lot of safety on the blog this week. One recent accident I haven’t talked about is an azide explosion at Minnesota – C&E News, though, has plenty of coverage. Back in June, a grad...
View ArticleTrimethylaluminum Explosion in Massachusetts
Word has come of a bad industrial accident in the town of North Andover, about 25 to 30 miles north/northwest of Boston. There’s a Dow facility there, the Advanced Materials division, and what makes...
View ArticleExplosion at BASF
Bad news from Germany this morning. There’s apparently been a very large explosion at the BASF Ludwigshafen facility. If you’ve ever been through that part of the country, you’ll know that that’s a big...
View ArticleChemical Storage, Good and Not So Good
Back to science! I will admit that my Twitter feed is going to be rather more politicized than usual for some time to come, but this is not a political site, and thank God for that. I have to say, it...
View ArticleHow Not to Do It: TATP
You may well have heard about an incident at the University of Bristol, where a student inadvertently prepared some triacetone triperoxide (TATP). That’s a substance that I definitely won’t work with,...
View Article4-Azidophenylalanine: A Warning
There’s a reagent used in chemical biology and protein labeling that should be getting a bit more attention than it does. Not because it’s useful – that’s already known – but because it can explode....
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Sodium Hydride in Aprotic Solvents: Look Out
Here’s a safety warning for my fellow synthetic organic chemists. It’s a reagent combination whose hazards have been noted before, but a lot of people don’t seem to know about it: sodium hydride in...
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