Dealing With Unstable Compounds: Part 1

When I was a graduate student I was doing a demonstration of the generation of Cl2 from a reaction mixture containing potassium permanganate and HCl for an inorganic chemistry lab. I had set out the equipment and reagents beforehand and when it came time to do the demo I did not re-check. It would appear that someone had taken the concentrated HCl and replaced it with concentrated H2SO4 without mentioning it to me. What I remember is doing the demonstration and not getting any chlorine so I told the students to move on while I worked on the demonstration. This will now sound overly mystical but while I was holding the apparatus puzzling at the appearance a voice said “Put it away”. I was holding it at arms length, towards the back of a fumehood when it exploded, shredding the cuffs of my labcoat, spraying me with a mixture of concentrated acid and permanganate and (in a delightful escalation of events) breaking open several winchesters of waste organic solvent that a research group had decided to store in the teaching lab fumehood. The solvents caught fire. I was focussed on my face and immediately turned to a sink and began to hose my upper body with cold water. There was a point when I had two graduate students, Mike and Daniel at my back trying to put out the fire with fire extinguishers while I yelled that I needed to keep the cold water flowing on me. When they finally dragged me out of the lab the permanganate in my hair combined with the cold water to produce a ghastly effect for the assembled students and faculty as I was escorted past the evacuated building. I called my wife of six months from the hospital and for the first (but not the last) time started the conversation with "First of all I want you to know that I am alright". In the post accident analysis, the professor in charge of the course (who I privately suspect of accidently making the acid switch) just said “Well, it will make the students very safety conscious and the lab needed a good cleaning anyway”. All because I did not re-check the reagents before doing the demo. Remember, it was only stupid if you did not learn from it.



A selection on Mn chemistry from Cotton and Wilkinson, "Advanced Inorganic Chemistry, 5th Ed."