From sci.chem Tue Dec 10 17:16:15 1996 From: Juha Tenhosaari Subject: Re: Lab Accidents....... Hauke Reddmann wrote: > I was deposing sodium that was used to dry ether. A collegue > of mine said: "Down with it in the kitchen sink, a bit sodium > won't hurt." (He's even more a walking desaster area than me :-) This brings to my mind one of the horror stories my father kept telling me when I was a kid.. This happened at the 70's when my father was working as a research chemist in a pharmaceutical company. In the laboratory there was a sodium press (what's the proper word ?) for making thin sodium wire. One day when a lab tech needed some wire, the device had got blocked and refused to give out any. The lab tech then decided to de-block it with his finger (at this point the sodium inside was under a high pressure) with the result that a piece of sodium wire penetrated through his finger. IIRC the finger had to be amputated. And another story, now in a different company.. A lab tech who was supposed to use an oxygen mask, accidentally connected the mask to a nitrogen tap. After the first breath he went totally unconscious. Luckily there were others that saw what happened, and took the mask away. Afterwards he said that it would have been an easy death. ----------------------------------------------- Juha Tenhosaari jtenhosa@cc.hut.fi http://www.hut.fi/~jtenhosa -----------------------------------------------