Pavlina: Life is Not For the Living

Location: My Office

Offenders: My co-workers

The Crime: Attempted storage of flammables with potential strong oxidizing agents

We are getting our labs renovated. So we have a very small flammable cabinet where we store many flammable materials. I have not really gone through and looked at what was in this cabinet, but the entire purpose of a flammable storage cabinet is two-fold; to vent flammable vapors and to contain any possible explosion.

In packing up the various rooms, my two co-workers emptied the flammable cabinet and stored the contents in a cardboard box. I went into the room, and finished packing it where I saw two large bottles of flammable materials. I went to the box and lo and behold there is an almost full bottle of sodium nitrite.

Sodium nitrite oxidizes to sodium nitrate; AKA saltpeter, the explosive. When you have a combustion reaction (fire, explosion, etc) you need a fuel source and an oxidant. The fuel source is the flammable material. The oxidant is what enables the flame to burn. When you strike a match, air is the oxidant and the sulfur mixture is the fuel, which does not last long (as anyone who has held a match too long knows, the match itself burns and if you aren’t careful you have burnt fingers).

So what we had was an oxidant stored right next to a flammable material. That is bad.

Why do I even bother to care? *sigh*

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