Tales O' Fire!

Yo...

I forgot to finish up my stories for chemistry week... You know, the ones involving me and fires in the lab.

Now, the fires I've experienced are nothing serious. I had a friend who had a three alarm fire in her lab in Texas. Mine aren't serious, and I didn't get hurt or anything. And when that happens, well... there is a strange thing with us chemists: Such fire stories turn into "war stories" of sorts. We sit around and retell them, like the great storytellers told ghost stories around bonfires back in the good ol' days of old. We even like to re-enact the events.

Yes it gets pretty elaborate. Yes, it is lame. We are just that nerdy.

So here's what's up...

Backdraft. So, in the same lab I mentioned before, the one where I worked with this doofus named Chang, one of the other students, had a little, uh... trouble.

In an organic lab, under no circumstances does one use a bunson burner. That is some ol' ish they did in high school. No flames in an organic lab. We had too many solvents around: acetone, ethers, hexanes, all kinds of crap we could hardly pronounce. ALL OF IT FLAMMABLE.

But we did have what we call heat guns. Heat guns look exactly like hand-held blow dryers, but not as cute, lol.

But heat guns aren't blow dryers. Blow dryers dry your hair. A heat gun heats up, and blows air at about 800-1000 degrees fahrenheit on the highest setting. You try to blow your hair dry with that type of heat and you'll set your whole head on fire.

Let's just say, I spilled something on my shirt, and took a wet paper towel and blotted it dry. My shirt was a little wet. Thought I'd use the heat gun to, you know, dry it off. I could set it on the lowest setting. I think that was 500 degrees or so.

Well I dried my shirt alright. There was a tiny burn hole, and a big scorch mark on my shirt. And I dried it while I had my shirt ON.

Big scorch mark. I remember Cowgirl Cre saying "What happened?"

Humph. Went home... and saw that my bra strap was a little scorched.

DANG!

But, one day my lab partner Tom was stooped to the floor and had a large flask in his hand containing a couple of liters of pentane, a VERY volatile and HIGHLY flammable liquid. I was watching him stooped down, swirling away. I was sitting at my desk, some 20 feet away, doing my homework. So, we were talking about whatever, maybe some class assignment or something like that.

"LadyLee, I need to evaporate this pentane off real fast."

Now, we had actual machines for this. But he wanted to evaporate it fast.

I heard the heat gun switch on.

I looked over at him, and he was stooping down, swirling the large flask full of pentane.

I remember thinking, "He really shouldn't be doing that. That might be bad."

Now, I've never seen the movie Backdraft. I just remember the trailers and commercials, images of fire rolling beautifully across the ceilings and floor.

And by the time I was about to mention to Tom that he shouldn't be doing that, the flask ignited, and a fire was rolling across the floor towards me.

Tom dropped the flask and dipped. He was close to the door. All I remember seeing, past the floor of fire, which was about 8 feet by 15 feet and rolling FAST towards me, was the back of Tom's khaki pants and the tread of his shoe.

I hurdled my desk and shot through a door into another lab and then jumped out a window. (Don't worry, we were on the first floor).

The fire alarms sounded. Some 10 minutes later we went back into the building. I think Tom's woman saw his baseball cap on the floor and lost her freaking mind. Tom showed up from whereever he ran to some 5 minutes after I came back.

Turns out he had left, and then came back looking for me. I had left and was outside the building in about 15 seconds flat.

"LadyLee, you should've seen it. The waste containers had caught fire and it looked like flame throwers, and blah, blah, blah."

(I have learne that white men like this type of thing. I don't stick around for JACK. I'll holler at you later when the coast is clear.)

We talked about that for a couple of years. I remember saying, numerous times, "Man, all I saw was fire, the back of your khaki shorts, and the damn tread of your shoe. You were running that hard."

"Girl I was trying to get out of there!! I came back and you were gone!"

"But you left me!"

(I always had to do the damsel in distress move whenever I felt wronged. LOL).

Tom got a good tongue lashing from our advisor. Along with me in the background putting my two cents in, of course.

Yeah, that was some craziness...

Stay tuned for Tales O' Fire, Part II.