Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Update on the University of Hawaii explosion

On March 16, 2016, Dr. Thea Ekins-Coward was working in the laboratory of Dr. Jian Yu at the University of Hawaii on a biofuels project with a high-pressure hydrogen/oxygen mix. Because the mixture was in an inappropriate tank and the system was not grounded, the tank exploded and Dr. Ekins-Coward was severely injured. Here is the longer C&EN article about the investigative report about the incident. Via KHON (a Honolulu TV station, article by Manolo Morales), an update on the University of Hawaii Manoa hydrogen explosion:  
...In March 2016, a powerful explosion inside a laboratory rocked a building at the UH Manoa campus. HFD determined that a wrong pressure gauge was used, which caused a spark that led to the explosion. 
Ekins-Coward, a postdoctoral fellow was in that lab and lost part of her right arm. Her attorney says she has since moved back home to England and has struggled with getting her life back. 
“She still is very traumatized by the event, it distresses her to speak about it still and she still can’t do a lot of things,” said attorney Claire Choo. Things that most people take for granted. “Even eating a steak, cutting a steak, she can’t do it. Someone has to cut up her food for her so that takes a toll,” said Choo. 
She adds that Ekins-Coward is still trying to find the proper prosthetic. In the meantime, there’s the legal fight against UH which says that she was an employee at the time of the explosion. So she’s only entitled to workers compensation benefits, and cannot sue the university. “We think that the amount that she would be given at workers compensation is not sufficient to cover the pain and suffering and the injuries, and the injury to her career that she suffered through because of this incident,” said Choo. She says Ekins-Coward was never an employee and that UH made that clear when she was invited by UH to do her research. “They told her specifically that she was not an employee and she didn’t get the benefits of being an employee,” said Choo. 
She says UH then said it has an internal policy that considers researchers like Ekins-Coward as employees only to get workers compensation benefits. She is challenging this with the labor board. “So our position is she was not an employee. They made it very clear that she was never an employee, and that you can’t have your cake and eat it too,” said Choo. 
A hearing with the labor board is scheduled in December. Choo says it will likely take years before the issue is resolved because of appeals. UH says it is unable to comment on pending litigation.
It sounds like the case has not advanced much further than where it was in September 2018. Another reminder for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to not become Schrödinger's employee, and determine their status in terms of worker's compensation, benefits and the like. (Short answer: whatever status benefits the university? That's your status.) 

14 comments:

  1. I agree that clarifying this before starting is a good idea (and I love the "Schroedinger's employee" bit), but as a practical matter, I'm not sure how it would work. In my experience, lab heads are not especially good at remembering the details of current university policy. But who would be an appropriate person? A chair? A dean? And what form would be appropriate for the information to the prospective postdoc--an email? A signed letter?

    I don't recall a whole lot of formal statements on paper from the start of my postdoc--I had to sign paperwork for the library, the department and the IACUC, there was a pretty informal statement that I was not and would not ever be eligible for the university's 403b, and that anything I invented while working at, on vacation from, using resources of, or physically close to the university was in fact their intellectual property. But that's it.

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  2. How the hell does Jian Yu still have a professor job after it was exposed that he didn't understand that a hydrogen-oxygen mix could explode?! It's obvious to me that this guy is dangerously incompetent to be in charge of a lab. I wouldn't hire him for a technician job.

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    1. I would gladly take over his job tomorrow, no questions asked.

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    2. Why does he still have a job? Tenure. And he may still bring in grants. Not the first time tenure protects incompetents (who were probably formerly competent) from getting fired, happens all of the time in fact.

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    3. Formerly competent deadwood professors know their stuff; they've just decided they've earned the right to slack off after not being able to enjoy their twenties and thirties much while they were doing the things it took to earn tenure.

      I'm just shocked at the ignorance of high-school level chemistry Prof. Yu displayed. I'm picturing someone who parroted his way through undergrad, robotted a bunch of experiments his advisor told him to do in grad school, then somehow got lucky when no one asked any tough questions during his job interview. Usually, these kinds of people get weeded out long before they make it all the way to a professor job!

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    4. The university has taken the stance that it was all the students fault, and therefore any disciplinary action would imply guilt.

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  3. The Worker's Compensation hurdle will be the key to this. WC is a "no-fault" insurance that gives workers compensation to make them "whole" (however defined) balanced against the worker cannot sue the employer for injury except in the most grievous of cases; in most states, the burden of proof will be with the plaintiff to show gross negligence, which is a very high bar to get over. I can see why UH is claiming "employee" status - it will be a lot less expensive for them in the long run if this stays a worker's compensation case.

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    1. You do wonder why it's so hard in this case to prove gross negligence. The non-sparkproof pressure gauge, the absence of grounding wire, the lack of packing material in the tank, the missing flashback arrestor, the utter fucking cluelessness of PI and EH & S, how much more do you actually need? People ought to be thrown into prison for this orgy of hazardous behaviour!

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    2. If Yu really did understand the dangers and didn't care, he deserves to be thrown into prison for gross negligence. If he was clueless and in way over his head, the hiring committee deserves to be thrown into prison for gross negligence!

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    3. Yu was probably a biologist with an interest in chemistry, who never was curious enough to see a hydrogen + oxygen demonstration on you-tube. Too busy writing grants and at the faculty club. Expected his post-docs to take care of themselves and the lab. This is normal, right?

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    4. I'm familiar with an incident when one day there appeared in a shared lab a Parr bomb reactor on the benchtop. No shielding, and the vent from the burst disk was connected to some vinyl tubing. There was a grad student running a reaction that was prone to sudden exotherms, C&EN had reports of explosions and demolished ovens. The thing belonged to a materials chemist who was frankly clueless. Anon @7:05 is right on the money.

      It was a distressing episode, actually. Showing the incident reports to the idiot PI didn't help, EH&S had no clue about pressure vessel safety, and the chair wasn't much interested either. We had to threaten to call OSHA on the department.

      What you'd like to see is severe consequences for safety infractions, not merely for mishaps that involve injuries or loss of life, but also for near misses and actions that put people at risk. The fire chief won't hesitate to shut an establishment down right now when he sees a fire escape chained shut. You'd like to see 7-figure fines and serious prison time for risky behaviour from PIs. What you can't do is leave lab safety to students and postdocs dependent on their advisor.

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    5. I can promise that running the reactor on the bench was the pI's instruction....

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  4. One time I had to use hydrogen while we were in the process of relocating labs, which entailed wheeling the hydrogen cylinder strapped to a dolly to my fumehood (instead of just using the "hydrogen lab"). At some point during my experiment, while I was out to lunch, someone decided to wheel a matching oxygen cylinder and park it immediately next to my hydrogen (the relocation process was chaotic and people were taking any opportunity to shift their clutter elsewhere). Upon my return from lunch, I had a technician go absolutely berserk at me, for being "so incredibly stupid" to put hydrogen and oxygen together. Despite me saying about 10 times that I had nothing to do with the oxygen being there, this red-faced technician endured, and lectured me for another five minutes until I had no choice but to agree that it was indeed very dangerous and could have leveled the building. They need to ship that technician over to Hawaii and get her to teach Jian Yu the lesson I didn't need to be taught.

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    1. What would the damn fool say when you show him an oxyhydrogen torch + cylinder cart? Oxygen and hydrogen are dangerous when mixed, but when they spontaneously release themselves from their cylinders you have a different problem! (Youtube has some terrifying videos of fires and flying cylinders.)

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20