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Previous by Date: Subject: [DCHAS-L] ECHA: Four new substances added to the Candidate List Date: Tuesday, July 16, 2019 at 8:25:10 AM Author: DCHAS Membership Chair <membership**At_Symbol_Here**DCHAS.ORG> |
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There's a very helpful article about laboratory disaster planning at
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02151-0
Nature
Explosions, floods and hurricanes:
Planning ahead and staying flexible are key to coping with the unexpected.
Glaciologist Martin Sharp at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, vividly remembers a particular Sunday in early 2017. At midday on 2 April, a freezer malfunction at the Canadian Ice Core Archive (CICA) caused the partial melting of one-eighth of the facility‰??s 1,409-metre collection of ice cores, the oldest of which dated back more than 60,000 years. The centre had opened just six months earlier, and its systems had been functioning reliably.
Not only did the cooling system inside one of the facility‰??s two freezers fail, the warning system that was designed to send an alert in the event of a malfunction failed as well, explains Sharp, who is CICA‰??s principal investigator (PI). The university became aware of the problem only when the freezer temperature hit 35‰??ĺˇC, triggering a fire alarm.
It was a holiday weekend, and all of the scientists were off campus. ‰??When I got there, maybe an hour and a half after it was initially discovered, it was like a sauna,‰?? Sharp says, ‰??with steam visible in the air and water on the floor.‰??
Sharp and his colleagues immediately shifted the partially melted cores ‰?? some 13% of the collection ‰?? into a functioning freezer. In the moment, there was little else to be done, although the team worried about accidentally analysing refrozen meltwater instead of unaffected, pristine ice.
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continued at URL above
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