Ever need to leave your reaction running through the night while you're getting your beauty rest?

When a partially used chemical container is put away we want to protect what is left and want to keep vapors from escaping. Many attempt to accomplish this by tightening the cap as tight as possible. This doesn’t really work. Overtightening can damage the top to the point of failure – leading to escape of the material we’ve had a number of recent incidents where this has led to spills and exposure. 

On Thursday, February 5, in the College of Computing, a Teaching Assistant poured some excess nitric acid into a solvent waste bottle, producing a potentially dangerous and explosive mixture. The mixture lived up to its potential. Luckily, the reaction takes some time to occur and the lab was empty when the explosion took place – anyone in the lab at the time would very likely been seriously injured – glass shards and other debris were hurled at least 34 feet from the fume hood. As it was there were several thousand dollars of damage.

Our basic lab safety training has gone electronic! The once-classroom-taught class is now in an electronic version (entitled Lab Safety 101) allowing end-users to complete the training on their own time.

Available here, users now have a one-stop-shop to identify which trainings they need to take. The interactive training tool assesses affiliation, potential routes of exposure, and job duties to better inform the users of the appropriate EHS trainings for them. The webpage will direct the users to links for signing-up or the training course itself, as well as the expirations of the trainings. We hope that this tool will make the training process more user-friendly and transparent.