Via KHON, this news at the end of a nine year legal saga:
HONOLULU (KHON2) — An academic researcher who was severely injured in a lab explosion at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa reached a $6.7 million settlement after an almost decade-long legal battle.
Dr. Thea Ekins-Coward lost a portion of her right arm when her experiment exploded back in March 2016.
Following the incident, the university denied liability, saying Ekins-Coward was an employee covered by limited workers’ compensation.
Here's her legal firm's public statement:
An academic researcher was seriously injured when her laboratory experiment exploded. The university who sponsored the research denied liability. The university first claimed that, as our client’s employer, her claims against it were barred by the workers’ compensation statutes. So, we obtained a ruling that our client was not the university’s employee, even though the university paid her a stipend and provided her certain benefits.
The university next blamed our client for using inappropriate and unsafe equipment. But we showed that the university approved the equipment, and that the university should have better trained our client on safety measures that should be taken when working with explosive gasses.
The settlement we achieved was calculated to take care of our client’s needs going forward. And as a result of the investigation, universities across the country changed their laboratory safety practices so that other researchers would not suffer similar injuries.
I hope the settlement ends this long and painful chapter for Dr. Ekins-Coward, who appears to have moved on with her life in science.
From the broad academic chemical/laboratory safety perspective, I simply do not think anymore (after the Beacon rainbow flame incident) that large settlements actually make a national impact. Individual PIs and researchers will definitely not hesitate to set up risky experiments because (I suspect) they are simply not experienced enough or not trained enough to recognize that (for example) a gas mixture of hydrogen and oxygen would require strict control of static electricity in the research environment.
Best wishes to Dr. Ekins-Coward.
I cannot help but also think that in today's clearly restricted funding environment, one possible outcome may be that schools will cut down on research safety oversight. I'm not sure that will have a dramatic impact on overall incidences of laboratory safety incidents in either direction, but it sure won't help.
"they are simply not experienced enough or not trained enough to recognize that (for example) a gas mixture of hydrogen and oxygen would require strict control of static electricity in the research environment."
ReplyDeleteNot trained enough?! Anyone who passed high school chemistry should know that a tank filled with a hydrogen-oxygen mix is a bomb. It's obvious to me that both Elkins-Coward and Jian Yu got their PhD's by robotting experiments that their advisers told them to do, and Prof. Yu must have somehow slipped past a hiring committee that didn't ask any tough questions during his research talk. I've worked with lab technicians who are more qualified for a professor job than this guy is.
That's because hiring committees nowadays seem to prefer poorly trained people who produce irreproducible yet boner-inducing results.
DeleteYes, it's absurd that anyone with a PhD in any type of experimental science could be unaware of the potential hazards of H2/O2 mixtures. The growing number of incompetent researchers is one of the most serious issues facing academic research, on par with what the current administration is doing. I regularly see articles published in top journals that get intro-level undergrad chemistry and physics wrong in a way that compromises the validity of the conclusions. It undermines the credibility of research, and in instances like this accident, also jeopardizes safety. People with PhDs should be smart enough to figure out how to properly conduct experiments.
DeleteAll of these responses show a fundamental misunderstanding of my point (which I find revealing itself) - yes, of course a hydrogen/oxygen mixture is extremely flammable. Thinking about static electricity to the point of checking your equipment as a potential source of a spark is /not/ part of the perfunctory oral training that most chemists get in graduate school. If you got that in your training, you got better training than I. - CJ
DeleteI (poster at 11:40) think that familiarity with the hazards of static electricity is part of being aware of the hazards of an H2/O2 mixture. I think I would have been aware of static electricity ignition as a hazard with H2 even when I was in high school, though I would not have known how to mitigate the risk effectively. That PhD level researchers could not figure this out is a consequence of decades of holding students to lower and lower standards.
DeleteI was pretty oblivious in grad school (not a postdoc) but I don't think I would have checked inside the equipment for spark generation (I wouldn't have thought to, and it's also possible that I could have caused more damage by doing so.) Even if you know that a spark is bad, I'm not sure what safety features are standard to detect and mitigate it. The explosion of H2 at UMissouri also indicates that even with safety systems (not enough - they needed lower H2 concns.) H2 is touchy.
DeleteIf losing money from insufficient concern for safety isn't enough for universities to do what they're paid for (in overhead), then I am not sure what will (since I assume that money is priority 1-5 for universities). Criminal prosecutions are difficult and seem to be done in the wrong places and times. Maybe if overhead payments were contingent on improvement of safety conditions after accidents? - Hap
Right, I did not mean to say the postdoc was wrong for assuming the equipment was safe. The PI of the lab should have known to consider it as an issue and whoever at the university approved the equipment for use should also have checked that there was no way of igniting the gas mixture inside the apparatus.
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