Looks like lessons were not learned from the previous small explosions in the lab. Mixing hydrogen and oxygen without proper controls and hazard assessment can always lead to a big explosion. This incident could have been easily stopped using proper controls. Big loss for the researcher! We need to look the safety culture of the lab involved in this incident plus departmental culture as a whole. Was a SOP developed by the PI of the lab for this experiment, we would like to see the same. Otherwise it only remains a forum discussion, similar to the rainbow experiment.

This makes me indescribably sad. The fact that the smaller "near misses" were reported but no corrective action was taken by the laboratory management makes this accident seem like it could have been prevented.

It is frustrating that it is such a stark contrast with industry, where even something as seemingly minor as the potential of a pinched finger in a cabinet requires a report and corrective action implementation. In comparing industry and academia on safety standards, it seems that at heart, academia should be MORE strict with safety, not less. In an industry lab, many of the risks are well known, whereas in academic research, one is often pushing the boundaries of current knowledge, meaning that all of the risks are not well known or understood. This should make us MORE vigilant rather than less vigilant. What needs to be done to make a change? It seems that our collective sadness over these stories isn't encouraging change. Do we need to restrict funding until appropriate safety measures are implemented? Do we need to resort to punitive measures?

I am thankful that this accident did not result in loss of life. I wish Dr. Ekins-Coward all the best in her recovery, both physically and mentally.

Think Challenger 1986. O-ring failure lead to disaster and loss of 7 lives. There was ample evidence of O-ring deterioration in previous flights, but no one did anything about it since it did not end disastrously. The model: it was OK before, it will be OK in the future--not.

I am not familiar with this particular experiment setup and procedure but it seems dangerous under any circumstances to mix oxygen and hydrogen within the explosion limits, which for hydrogen are very broad (~4 to 95% H2 in the gas mixture, Chem Eng,. Technol. 2004, 27, 847). This seems like a recipe for disaster in the waiting in any case, especially considering the very low energy needed to ignite this mixture (about 0.02 millijoules).

I have no access to the original paper, so I can only question why Yu used an intrinsically-safe gauge but the student didn't. Did the original paper SPECIFY "intrinsically-safe", or was the valve used one that happened to be so rated? I certainly hope the paper warned readers about this seemingly mundane detail.

Regardless of why the student failed to exactly follow the original paper, this incident CLEARLY points out the typical lack of concern in educational facilities about safety--UNTIL a catastrophe occurs! Personally, I am grateful to have worked for a few years in an excellent industrial research facility before doing my thesis research. There were no exceptions to rigorous safety procedures, and all technologists had to rotate through safety inspection teams that checked all labs monthly.

Safety-wise, my grad school experience was a shock many decades ago, and it seems little has changed since. I cannot claim to be the most safety-conscious chemist in history, but even a tiny quantity of O2-H2 mixture in a pressure vessel would make me nervous. The original experiment used a gallon. It got scaled up to 13. That's a car gas tank full. Of a gas mixture with the highest energy and widest explosive range of all. OMG!

A mixture of 70% hydrogen, 25% oxygen, and 5% carbon dioxide seems to have a ratio of hydrogen to oxygen not far from stoichiometric, hence just needs any ignition source to cause explosion. Some time ago there was another accident, at a Texas Tech lab, in which High Energy Materials were studied. That accident was different in many respects, but a learning from it was to use limited amounts of explosive material. If applied at University of Hawaii lab, that rule would almost certainly forbid using 49L tank for the explosive gas mixture.

My time as a student versus my time in industry is night and day in regards to safety and acceptable chemical hygiene. The 'it won't happen to me' mentality gets people killed. Academic institutions need tougher and and accountable enforcement of safe and proper lab policies/SOPs or we will end up with more Thea's and Sheri's.

A mixture like that!?!?!? Not behind heavy shields? What were they thinking?

I ALWAYS assumed my reagents/mixtures/solutions would catch on fire, treated them accordingly.Should be standard assumption.

I am a researcher in the same building as the HNEI, although not on the same floor, and not in the same field. We felt the explosion rattle the floor and walls eight floors up - Dr. Ekins-Coward is truly lucky to be alive. The incident has prompted campus-wide laboratory safety re-certification efforts here, particularly with regard to pressurized gas cylinders, whether or not they contain flammable gases. PIs, please take the time to discuss with your lab staff and students proper gas handling - students and staff, if you see red flags, don't let up until your PI fixes the issue. It really sucks having something like this happen in your University, let alone your own lab building and community.

This was indeed a tragedy not only because there was an incident and the loss of an arm but also because those who should be skilled in the art of reactivity failed to even consider the minimum of safety precautions. Having spent 25 years in an industrial research lab dealing with reactions where a predictive guess can be made the unusual can happen and must be designed into the set ups to help minimize personal exposure. I hope that out of this will come some well formulated procedures to help find and fix possible failures in all lab experiments carried out. This is a very hard and expensive lesson to learn.

How did Prof. Yu manage to get a PhD and a professor job without knowing that a tank of mixed H2 and O2 is a bomb? I don't just question his commitment to safety; I question his basic competence.

I hope someone has set up or secured the oxygen cylinder that is haphazardly hanging there in one of the photos.

As a school boy many years ago, one of my favorite hangouts was the Franklin Institute. A most impressive display was the automated mixing of hydrogen and oxygen to form droplets of water.The terrific bang that accompanied this micro scale display still remains in my memory.

A totally ridiculous and negligent thing to let happen anywhere, and especially at a University. Chemists at all stages of training widely perceive and believe industrial labs to have better safety cultures than those in academics. At the University level, there is a persistent and unchanging "I'll take care of it myself/I can't be bothered/Everything is fine right now" attitude that is passed from many advisers to their students. I studied at two top universities and now work for a major chemical company. The difference in the perception of safety and the execution of safe lab practices is truly night and day. Students feel un-empowered to report incidents/accidents or to suggest lasting improvements to the safety culture. They are often unaware of how to actually address problems at the correct level, fearful of turning other students against them for pointing out bad/unsafe habits, and fear upsetting or bothering their adviser, who so often claims to be over-worked and too busy for so many others things (actual advising?) already. When will Universities accept that there changes to be made and that the culture has to change from the bottom up, with major input and guidance from PIs?

This is such a preventable tragedy. Makes me feel so sad to read this story. Working with such an easily combustible mixture without following proper standards, ignoring near misses. All these point to a poor culture of safety in labs. In my experience, safety culture in University labs is determined by the Professor (PI) leading the lab. In this lab, the pictures seem to indicate that they do not believe in basic gas cylinder safety. In the fourth photo, there appears to be 8 gas cylinders, most with regulators on not chained to the wall.

Yes, unsecured gas bottles speaks volumes (no pun intended). Colleagues and regulators, please, please reach out to research faculty at UH to learn more about the conditions under which we are expected to conduct experimental research.

The use in this article of the photo of the bloody lab jacket draped over the chair is unnecessary and tasteless. Unless I'm missing something, there isn't anything from that photo that can be taken as a learning tool to prevent future accidents. The other photos show the extent of the damage caused by the accident. The lab jacket photo, however, is not something that, in my opinion, is respectful to Dr. Ekins-Coward.

Holey Moley, I can't believe what I am seeing. Such a tragic and life altering loss for Ms. Ekins-Coward. That vessel is no way approved for holding a flammable gas mixture. The root cause is apparent from the pictures posted above. NO ONE had a clue about safety practices being followed in this lab. I would also like to thank the poster for including the picture of the bloodied lab coat. It does justice to the extent of this tragedy. Lab safety isn't just a video game where you can just press the reset button and start over. There are real life consequences to slipshod lab safety and it appears our university labs are bearing this out.

Program managers please reach out to UH Faculty to learn more about the conditions under which experimental research is conducted at this geographically remote location.

The pictures emphasize that when a researcher puts safety (and common sense) on the back burner, and allows another researcher to give them the "go-ahead" for a plan that already created one (smaller) incident disregarding both the potential for disaster and the evidence of a disaster already extant, a disaster is not just a possibility but a likelihood.

The story warns of "graphic images" but those images should be reviewed by anyone with keys to a lab, and by those planning on continuing a series of experiments already proven to be dangerous... so the researcher realizes that the cost of dropping safety protocols may be higher than one would think.

Sorry to see someone was injured. I saw more danger than shown. Two photos showed compressed gas cylinders with regulators attached but WERE NOT SECURELY CHAINED. What were these professors/researchers thinking? A broken regulator will launch a cylinder a long distance with severe consequences.

It is my belief that a root cause of this incident and indeed many incidents is the absence of safety education in undergraduate and graduate chemistry. Safety education is different from safety training. Safety education should seek to explain the "why" of hazards (broadly) so that this knowledge can be carried on to other endeavors such as graduate or post-doctoral research. Safety education serves two purposes: 1)to impart knowledge to students so that they can learn how to "recognize hazards, assess the risks of hazards, minimize the risks of hazards, and prepare for emergencies - RAMP". 2) continuous safety education throughout all the years of student also builds a strong safety ethic that encourages and enables one to always consider safety in their work. I also believe that if universities incorporated safety education into their undergraduate and graduate courses that this would build strong safety cultures as well.

It certainly looks like that the researcher did not take in to account of safety and hazards of the previous explosion before this experiment. Electric pressure gauges that are not sealed properly to prevent gases from entering the electrical part or switch part of the gauge should not have been used in this experiment, especially when 70% hydrogen, 25% oxygen and 5% carbon dioxide gas was used. Hydrogen is extremely reactive with air or oxygen gas, and the exothermic reaction releases a huge amount of energy. When the switch on electrical appliances are turned on or off, the metal contacts in the switch mechanism touch and pull apart, and a spark is transferred between the contacts- this i known as switch-bounce. The small spark carries sufficiently high amount of energy that can cause a huge explosion. As a chemist, I would not have carried out this gas based experiment at all if I checked to find that an electrical garage gauge was used- mechanical pressure gauge may have been an alternative or at the end of the experiment, the gases should have been removed from the gas tank before the electrical gauge is to be turned off. The same reason about the spark caused by switch bounce due to turning on and off of the switch can be used to explain why all flammable gases including carbon monoxide will ignite if the gas is under conditions where a switch is used and the gas is not sealed away from the switch (i.e. a great analogy would be carbon monoxide poisoning where carbon monoxide leaks from the gas pipes and into the room of a house, if the a wall switch to the lights or mains is pressed an explosion results). Although I am an organic chemist, I have worked with flammable gases and flammable chemicals in the past, and I always fill out lab safety forms and get all equipment checked before all experimentation. Looking at the photos, I was shocked to also see that one oxygen cylinder was knocked slightly- has it been knocked further to the ground the explosion could have been stronger and higher in energy killing both the postgraduate researcher and the professor. God saved them that day. If I was the professor, I would have immediately considered alternative options of the use of pressure gauges and what steps needs to be taken if an electronic pressure gauge is used because as a schoolboy decades ago, I studied chemistry, physics and electronics all to an advanced level before studying chemistry at university, and I was always well aware of the use of electronic instruments in flammable gases conditions, even carrying out such experimentation to this day.

In my opinion, both the researcher and professor, and the manufacturers of the electronic pressure gauge are 50:50 to blame for the accident. This is because the PG researcher and professor failed to consider in the safety of usage of highly flammable gases and the explosion from the previous experimentation. The manufacturers are also to blame for failing to manufacture a safe enough instrument to use under flammable gas conditions- manufacturers failed to manufacture an electronic pressure gauge where the circuit board and switch component of the gauge was not sealed tightly so no gases can enter the circuit board and switch component. Both the researcher and her tutor, and the manufacture need to make changes in safety- for the manufacture, they should manufacture instruments that are design safe for gaseous experiments.

I agree with all the commentators that were "shocked" by seeing such a large amount of inherently unstable gas mixture. The difference between academia vs. industry is most likely the lack of knowledge about "scale-up issues" and we might consider this to be such an issue. (although I wouldn't be happy to be anywhere close to a 1L cylinder with such a mixture).

I am saying this as I transitioned from academia to industry and deal with scale-up and calorimetry on daily basis.

Unsecured gas bottles, laboratory doors that open inwards instead of outwards with latch trip bars, an explosive gas containment vessel designed by the PI and fabricated by the victim, leaks noted and repaired by the campus leak repair shop, prior warning signs that include a "small explosion" and static shocks from said containment vessel,senior university official stating soon after accident "we have been doing it this way for years without any problems"..............HELLO!!!!!!!!!

Excellent points Ed.

It is very unfortunate that another serious accident has happened in a research laboratory. Working in the safety & health industry for 30 years, it boils down to behavior and mindset. Time and time again, we have discussions with post-doc students and PhDs in our industrial research labs, and often receive the same arrogant answer. These individuals are smart, they know they are smart, and they don't believe they need "us" telling them how to do anything. Their funding and time is sometimes limited, and they do not want to spend precious funding and time implementing safety. Quite often researchers get away with deficient hazard controls because the risk is low, but the level of risk is not always recognized or appreciated. It breeds overconfidence, arrogance and complacency--the result is disastrous. It needs to be a team effort from those providing the funding to the researchers, facility management, safety & health support and everyone in between.

There will always be an ignition source. One should always calculate the enthalpy of all possible reactions and compare that to TNT. If you have anything close to the enthalpy of decomposition of 0.1 g of TNT, which is 418.4 J, then you should conduct your experiments in a lab designed to mitigate explosions. A fume hood won't do it. Also the burst disc was improperly sized. Considering the amount of damage, the whole end of the tank should have been scored. In such cases people look for a scape goat, but really there is more than enough to go around: The post-doc, her adviser, the tenure committee, the heads of the lab techs and stockroom, the safety officers, the chairman, the dean, OSHA etc. Know the dangers of your chemicals; did you know sugar and flour are explosive? Be afraid and respect your chemicals, they bite.

Certainly a tragic and preventable event. Typically, there are several factors that contribute to such catastrophic accidents, but one or two root causes. Based on the pictures of the lab, it appears that overcrowding is one of these. This is evidenced by the generally cluttered appearance of the lab benches - very little free space; numerous gas cylinders, some of which appear to be unsecured; chemical storage cabinets in close proximity to the work areas; lab apparatus stacked one atop another. Trying to work safely under such conditions, day in and day out, sets the scene for accidents. Add to this the apparently "Jerry-rigged" pressure vessel apparatus, and perhaps a sense of urgency to get the work done, and you have a "perfect storm" scenario for tragedy.
Most universities have access to specialists for the design and testing of specialized apparatus. Why wasn't this done? In my judgment, any apparatus designed to manipulate pressurized, flammable gases should be built, tested, and certified by such specialists.

UPDATE: The University of California Center for Laboratory Safety has completed its investigation of the explosion, and concluded that the immediate cause was not a spark from the pressure gauge but an electrostatic discharge between Ekins-Coward and the gas tank. Going beyond the immediate cause of the explosion, however, “the overall underlying cause of the accident was failure to recognize and control the hazards of an explosive gas mixture of hydrogen and oxygen,” the UCCLS report says.

Story and links to the report are here: http://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i28/University-Hawaii-lab-explosion-likely.html