clean

The lab has been cleaned. This ordeal took two days with 5 diligently working lab mates and a couple of lazy sacks who pretended to care and only took the time to clean up their own personal messes. I try not to cuss a lot in this blog, so I won't comment further on the efforts of the lazy sacks. The lab is now just about as clean as a lab with a clean group would have it when it was dirty, and I think I'll have to settle for that. The real score comes in counting how many incidents there were, in which we scored very well. While cleaning and disposing of over 300 different containers with poor or non-existent labels, there were no occasions of damage to person or property. Broken glass, while amounting to several decently sized boxes, did not result in any cuts or glass dust inhalation. The main source of excitement came while cleaning out a badly degraded bomb flask which used to contain KCp* (a commonly used ligand). The usual routine, starting with an iPrOH quench followed by EtOH followed by MeOH followed by water, failed. The remaining potassium in the flask did not react until the water had been added, causing the entire flask to smoke for a minute or two before catching fire or an additional minute or two (a nice bright yellow flame, quite pretty actually if your not distracted by the fact that the flask could explode momentarily). This prompted detaching the D fire extinguisher from the wall and rushing it over, although its use was never necessary. It did, however, warrant a date change on the wall for "Days since last lab fire" from last August to yesterday.

A note on fire extinguishers: There are three commonly used types, A, B, and C, which are distinguished by their contents: water under pressure, compressed CO2, and a chemical flame retardant. Most people are aware of the difference because they have been told that spraying compressed water on an electrical fire is a poor idea. Just to show why a type D is necessary in this lab, consider that the fire started BECAUSE we put water (a type A extinguisher) on the metal. A type B is CO2 and no, using a type B is not going to cause global warming, but letting your house burn down will. We can't use a type B here because concentrated CO2 is an accelarant for combustible metals.

I don't know why type C doesn't work, but I'm guessing that the chemicals in a type C react similarly with the burning metal. Type D is just powdered NaCl (table salt) with high pressure argon gas. Think of it as the most expensive salt shaker money can buy.