Hello
I have spent over 45 years in the specialty gas industry and have investigated many incidents involving these gases which at times can have a unique behavior. Many of these incidents have not been well publicize and as a result the Lessons Learned or more importantly how the gas industry instigated new safety rules/packaging to prevent some of these incidents. Unfortunately as my generation has retired this knowledge in being lost. For example in 1984 a cylinder of germane exploded in Japan due to a self sustaining decomposition reaction, as a result the industry reduced the amount of germane filled in a cylinder to 20% of what was put into the cylinder in 1984. This industry best practice was almost changed in 2004 by the UN TDG to allow more germane to be put into cylinders. I wrote a letter to the UN describing this issue plus that of nitric oxide which caused a fatal accident in 1968 and the fill pressure was reduced to 500 psig. I am aware of at least 3 events with germane that the change in fill density has saved people from significant injury or fatality because the cylinder stayed intact. I am trying to write a book on the many incidents so they are not lost in history.
One of the challenges at Universities is the wide variety of chemicals, systems, processes you are faced with. Who do you turn to as an SME for a particular area? Practical compressed gas safety and emergency response knowledge for specialty gases is severely lacking. I have been teaching compressed gas safety and emergency response at over 15 -20 universities, fire depts, private companies a year and one of my key recommendations is development of preplans and equipment for ER. I have a unique perspective on chemical emergency response since I train users, suppliers, fire depts, waste disposal companies and regulatory agencies, each have a different understanding of the problem and how to deal with it. Doing it internationally for the last 30 years adds another layer of difficulty
I have been requested to submit an article for the Special Issue on Chemical Safety Education: Methods, Culture, and Green Chemistry in Feb. In this I have detailed some common problems that I have noted over the years at Universities and Lessons Learned. I hope you will be able to review this and use it as a reference
Eugene Ngai
Chemically Speaking LLC
www.chemicallyspeakingllc.com
From: ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**PRINCETON.EDU> On Behalf Of Wright, James
Sent: Wednesday, January 8, 2020 3:09 PM
To: DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**PRINCETON.EDU
Subject: Re: [DCHAS-L] Good idea or maybe not for SDSs
Hello,
I agree, it is my belief that determining proper emergency procedures as well as looking up previous incidents and lessons learned is required for a thorough risk assessment. For instance, it is easier to come up with What If questions when you know what has already happened and how you will respond.
In fact the lessons learned Prof. Merlic just published in JCHAS involving the washing of a vacuum pump with hexane, there was a similar but not as well publicized incident at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale June 2, 2010 and likely others that were never publicized. I only knew of SIUC's incident as it was briefly mentioned at the bottom of the C&EN News article (https://cen.acs.org/articles/88/web/2010/06/Research-Lab-Explosion-Injures-Four.html) about the University of Missouri anerobic chamber explosion. I appreciate UC CLS and other institutions that publish these Lessons Learned in a way that is easier to find and disseminate so that we can better avoid then next incident. Hopefully us safety professionals can encourage the researchers to be willing and able to find these documents as they are preparing their experiments not after something went wrong. Thanks!
Another Lessons Learned website: https://researchsafety.uchicago.edu/about/culture-of-responsibility/lessons-learned/
--Jim Wright, Ph.D.
FTLB ESH POC
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
Office: 303-384-6647
Mobile: 720-695-0791
All,
I would like to tie together two of today's email threads - SDS and Lessons Learned.
Lessons Learned databases are great repositories of safety information, but are too retrospective. Someone has an incident, googles it, and then discovers that it has happened before. So how can we use Lessons Learned in a prospective manner?
One way is to incorporate Lessons Learned writeups when we teach safety. Another possibility is to add a Lessons Learned field to both SDSs and also to the Laboratory Chemical Safety Summaries on PubChem. That way when researchers look up an SDS or search PubChem they find both safety information and also incidents to avoid. Food for thought.
Craig
Craig A. Merlic
Professor of Chemistry, UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Executive Director, UC Center for Laboratory Safety
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1569
You wrote "Well-meaning teaching assistants, who do not have instructions on what action to take depending on the size of a spill..." That's the problem, not the SDS. SDS's are one part of the Hazard Communication Standard which covers labeling, SDS's and employee training, (and SDS's do double duty as part of the training). I am sure some here will report that their laboratory training includes spill response, but in my academic experience (which is a bit dated now, but involved 5 major universities) I was *never* given any training in spill response. None. Never saw a spill kit, in fact. And that's just Plain Bad. I am sure our peers here will happily point us to their resources for such training, though!
SDS's are designed for the chemical in the form as it leaves the factory. Just because it's in a 500 mL bottle doesn't mean that's not on a pallet full of bottles, so one does need to consider the industrial worst case scenario. But it doesn't (and can't) anticipate every real world situation. For example, what about dilute solutions? That's been discussed here on the list previously: http://www.ilpi.com/dchas/2006/20060526d.html
In the end, you're absolutely correct - only the best SDS's do actually tell you what to do for small spills and those SDS's are rare. We can only lobby manufacturers to improve the instructions, however the problem there is that many have absolutely no idea themselves or don't want to dip their toe in that liability pool. Making this a legal requirement would be a regulatory morass - "small" depends on the properties of the material and it would take pages upon pages to describe the procedure to define "small" for each chemical. The Hazard Classification process is already a mind-numbing exercise as it is. Take a look: http://ilpi.com/msds/osha/1910_1200_APP_A.html
To channel Steve Ballmer, it's all about training, training, training.
PS: If you miss that last cultural reference, do a search on "Steve Ballmer" and "developers".
Hello and Happy New Year,
Imperfect as they may be, we rely on SDSs for guidance in dealing with chemicals.
For student laboratories, problems arise that are different from industrial scale problems. SDSs seem to be concerned with the industrial scale. Take for examples, what to do in case of a spill. Would it not be helpful if SDSs were to designate size-appropriate actions? It seems to me that, generally speaking, spilling a milliliter of sulfuric acid should require a different response from that for the spill of a tank car full of sulfuric acid. Well-meaning teaching assistants, who do not have instructions on what action to take depending on the size of a spill, will tend to act on the side of caution (we would hope) which may involve unnecessary expense and disruption. Would there not seem to be practical value in an SDS saying something along the lines of "This amount is a small spill and you should do this, that amount is a medium spill and you should do that, more than this sized spill means you should evacuate and call 911!"? Clearly, what constitutes the various categories of spill size differs from substance to substance, which is why the SDS would seem (to me) the appropriate place for this information. There might even be the benefit of making some SDSs less scary.
This might be asking a bit much from documents that say to wear appropriate gloves without saying which gloves are appropriate. Should I just put this in my next letter to Santa?
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