Ingredients for a Positive Safety Culture

With Thanksgiving on the horizon, many of us are planning ahead for our favorite and most elaborate meal of the year. We make shopping lists, line up our kitchen hardware, choreograph our stoves and microwaves, and delegate dessert to the people we trust. It works best when managed from the top down (by my UC Berkeley friend Matt Francis, for example), with attention to detail, careful risk assessment (are you sure you want to beta test that new recipe on this day?), and contingency plans (i.e., find out in advance which pizza places are open). It’s a good thing the stakes are not all that high should things take a wrong turn. Unfortunately, this is not the case in the laboratory setting. A lack of careful planning that includes hazard assessments and integrated safety precautions leads, at best, to a bad experiment and, at worst, to a tragedy. Indeed, a review of the last 12 months would lead to the disappointing conclusion that academic chemistry still has a major safety problem, despite heightened attention to the issue in the wake of fatal laboratory accidents such as the flash fire at UCLA in 2008. So many lessons were learned from that disasterbroad lessons regarding the responsibility and accountability of lab heads, the importance of collaborative relationships between EH&S specialists and the researchers they serve, and the imperative that everyone from top to bottom embrace a culture that prioritizes safety above all else. And specific lessons were learned as wellbest practices such as reading the MSD sheet and understanding the potential hazards of chemicals before setting up an experiment, discussing potential hazards with colleagues, assessing risks that amplify with scale, consulting EH&S experts when in doubt, wearing appropriate personal protective equipment, never working alone in a lab, and knowing what to do and whom to call in the rare case when things go south. Then later, acknowledging error and accepting responsibility, identifying root cause, and improving processes so we can teach new lessons. UCLA’s Craig Merlic even created the UC Center for Laboratory Safety. Still, we read again and again about laboratory accidents. Over the past 12 months alone, there have been numerous accidents in both academia and industry, grave enough to draw international attention. • In December 2015, postdoc Meng Xiangjian, 32, was killed following a hydrogen tank explosion in his lab at Tsinghua University in China. The accident called into question wider safety practices among Chinese chemists, particularly because Xiangjian was working alone on the day of his death. • January 2016 brought two more major explosions one an accident involving a dangerous mix of trimethylaluminum and water at Dow Chemical in Massachusetts and another at PeroxyChem in Texas when an “over-pressurized tank” exploded. These incidents resulted in multiple serious injuries and one death at the scene in Texas. • In March 2016, an undergrad at Texas Tech was injured in a minor explosion when he omitted an experimental step while collecting a dry precipitate powder with a metal spatula, and of course, there was the deeply troubling incident at the University of Hawaii when postdoc Thea Ekins-Coward lost an arm due to a static electricity charge that ignited a highly flammable, pressurized tank of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. • April was the deadliest month for chemical accidents in 2016. On April 16, a massive fire at Jubail United Petrochemical in Saudia Arabia killed 12 and injured 11 more. According to Nature World News, the fire started when “maintenance contractors and technicians were replacing catalysts”, which led to a suffocating thick black smoke that trapped employees inside the plant. Just four days later, on April 20, 2016, an explosion at a Pemex vinyl chloride plant in Mexico killed 32 workers and injured another 136, believed to be due to a gas leak somewhere in the petrochemical plant. • October 2016 brought the most recent round of chemical accidents. At Dickinson State University in North Dakota, Professor Ken Pierce sustained nonlife-threatening injuries after the flash powder demonstration he was performing exploded. Lastly, on October 17, an explosion at the German chemical plant BASF killed four and injured at least 29 more.