Tales O' Fire (Part II)

Now, I've had one other little fire incident in the laboratory, and incidently, it occurred in the same lab as the one talked about in Part I.

And this one involves that doofus Chang. Not directly, but it was the results of one of his mistakes/shortcuts.

As I said before, there is always one person in the chemistry lab who is a danger to himself and everyone else. And Chang was it. He broke a lot of stuff, tore up a lot of stuff... then would break out crying about it. We thought we could put him in charge of ordering our chemicals, because you can't muck that up. Just fill out an order form. Can't be that doggone hard, can it?

Well, Chang liked to take short cuts and save money. I think this may have stemmed from our advisor telling Chang "Don't spend too much money!"

Now, in a lab where we worked with HIGHLY moisture sensitive materials, it was highly important to make sure all solvents are "dry". No water whatsoever. And you can order solvents where it is already "anhydrous" (dry). (But they are expensive, you see.) We ordered "anhydrous" solvents for general use and we put them through drying/purification stills.

General rule: "Never order cheap wet solvents."

Chang rule: "It's cheap, it saves us money. I'm ordering it!"

So...

I was doing a reaction one day, and since this was some 15 years ago, I can't really remember what it was I was working on. But it involved dropping some lithium metal in ethyl ether. I'd done this plenty of times before then.

I didn't get ether out of the stills. I got it straight out of what I thought was a bottle of anhydrous ether.

Well, I had about 1/2 liter ether in a flask, and I dropped some lithium in it.

It bubbled and fizzed like crazy. I had it in the back of a fume hood, a work area for chemistry work that contains fumes, etc...

I remember thinking..."Gee, that isn't suppose to do that."

I had my hand on the flask. I pushed it back further in the hood, thinking, maybe I just need to let that "calm down".

Then, all of sudden, before I could move my hand.

WHOOSH!!

It sounded like when I'm preparing a grill, and I throw a lit match on lighter fluid-soaked coals.

And I didn't move my hand in time. My hand and wrist caught fire. What a sight.

I snatched my hand back and shook it hard in the air. The fire went out, but not before singeing a little of my hair.

OH. MY.

Well, I almost fainted. I don't know who came and checked on me, but I remember hiding out in the ladies restroom just down the hall.. .

It is at these times that you need some alone time. To pray, to reflect... to something.

Now, I didn't need any medical attention. If there is one thing I've learned, it's that solvent will burn and burn itself out. My hand was coated in solvent that splashed out of the flask. It seems as if that was what protected my skin. (Yeah, that don't make any sense to me either. But it is what it is. Personally, I like to think it was divine protection, you know?)

It could've been bad if I wasn't curious about all the "fizzing".

My peeps joned me something terrible later that day. There was a black film festival on campus and I met up with them. They could smell the burn of my hair. (Wasn't bad, only along the edge near my left temple.) So there was a lot of "What's that smell, is something on fire??"

LOL

(Yeah, it took them a month to uh, forget about it all.)

Well, I told my advisor about this. He thought the same thing I thought: That ain't suppose to happen. Plus, I'd done whatever I was working on several times before. And there would be only one or two small bubbles. Never some alka-seltzer hard fizzling.

Hmm...

We went and looked at the bottle of solvent. Turns out Chang had ordered the cheap stuff. When solvents are cheap, they usually contain a good bit of water (well, too much to be using in an organic lab).

I lit into that doggone Chang. I must say to this day, I haven't cussed anyone out THAT bad since. He already thought I was the angry black woman. Every time I saw dude - in class, walking down the hall, walking around campus - I would point and say some choice words. I had him scared to death. I remember him being in tears a couple of times. (I wasn't moved by that AT ALL).

Of course, my advisor snapped on him. It wasn't good enough for me. I wanted him to take his belt off and whoop that joker. But Chang was VERY sensitive, a big cryer. He always eventually got a pat on the shoulder. I couldn't stand how him and others around me were babied.

Me and Chang didn't get along as it was, and we didn't get along AT ALL after that. I think I stopped talking to him. And he knew not to even think about me or even look at me.

Anyway... I know I make sure to check my materials before I use them. I can blame Chang's ineptness all day, but at the end of the day, I have to be careful...

Last week, some 15 years later, I googled ol' Chang to see what he's up to. He appears to be successful and doing well. He has a nice impressive list of accomplishments. I saw him at a conference some 8 years ago, and I could see the fear in his eyes when he saw me.

Yes, I thought about his "doofiness" then. All his shenanigans ran across my mind in one big blur...

But what's done is done.

Plus, I don't work with him.

And hopefully, I never will again...

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.