Which got me to thinking about all the completely non-nonsensical BS that goes on in our neck of the woods.
What kills me is that I work in a brand-spanking-new building (so everything was built to current code) and the H&S goons stop by monthly with a giant bucket to make sure our safety showers all work.
They all work, hence the need for a bucket -- there is no drain in the floor under ANY of them. In an open lab space, someone needing to use the safety showers (for the prescribed 10-15 minutes) would flood the entire floor. I get that you don't just want to wash nasty chemicals down the drain, but wouldn't it be a good idea to route the safety shower drain (if you had one in the first place) to some kind of containment tank...so that the nasty chemicals don't just spread all over the floor?? Just sayin'.
Also, not a H&S issue, but another laboratory design flaw - I would like to have words with the dude who decided that the ONLY thermostat for the entire lab space (open lab which occupies 1/2 a floor) should be located in the side room that houses at least a dozen -80C freezers. This is good for the freezers. They generate a lot of heat, and above a certain threshold temperature they just can't cope and they shut off. That would be bad. We want to keep our freezers happy, so it's important to adequately air condition that room.
But it can be a real problem if the only thermostat for the entire lab space, which controls the A/C output for the entire lab space is located in a room that is always needing to be cooled. It means that the rest of the lab, where people actually work, is kept at an arctic setting all day long.
The week after we moved into our shiny new lab I had several reagents fall out of solution because it got too cold.
And even now, years later, most of us run space heaters under our desks in order to avoid hypothermia. I keep several extra layers of clothes in the lab so that I can change out of skimpy-athletic-wear-required-to-survive-while-biking-to-work-in-Subtropical-City-in-July, and into several layers of performance fleece. Yeah, in July.
I know it's not July right now but think about the absurdity of our institution's carbon footprint for just a minute. Cool building to uncomfortably frigid temperatures
And now they're asking us to "carefully consider your at-work energy expenditure and make efforts to reduce it so as to save energy costs during these financially trying times". This makes me giggle maniacally because apparently the original building plans called for thermostats in each independent space (our laboratory is definitely independent from the -80C freezer room), but they scrapped all but the absolutely necessary thermostats in order to cut building costs. Did they really think that the cost of installing several thermostats would not be recovered in a few years (hell, a few months) of operation?
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I get the annoyance of safety showers but EH&S rules generally require that there NOT be a drain in the vicinity of safety showers. While a contaminant tank would prevent chemicals from entering the general water supply, what if there were multiple safety showers flushing down chemicals which react with each other? I think the even bigger problem comes with radioactivity spills.
It's not just your building -- I've worked in a variety of buildings, and none of them, from the oldest to the very newest, have drains under the safety showers.
Yeah, every building I've ever worked in lacks shower drains too. I still think it's stupid though.
I thought about the reactivity problem, but if you consider a) the likelihood of multiple users at any given time, b) the likelihood of those user washing off chemicals that could dangerously react with one another, and c) the total H2O output of one of those showers if used for the prescribed period of time (seriously, they're fierce!)...it seems that even if you ever did have multiple chemicals that just might react with one another headed for the tank at the same time, the dilution factor would render the whole thing irrelevant.
And I am suspicious that in the event of real safety shower usage, they'd just send someone with a mop and bucket to clean up the mess on the floor (assuming it's not radioactive), who would then dump it down the drain in the janitor's closet. I don't know this for sure, having never had the occasion to use a safety shower, but given the nature of the stuff we use in the lab here anyway, most of it can and does go down the drain once properly diluted.
But then, I am not privy to the strange workings of the H&S thought process.
Having seen a safety shower in use, I can attest that (at least here), they rope off the hallway, pour some kind of powdery stuff over all of it, presumably to counteract whatever was washed off, let it sit for a few hours, and then clean it all up.
I once had to use a safety shower at a different institution when a post-doc accidentally poured 10mL of EtBr on me... and then someone had to filter all the safety shower water through an EtBr filter. It at least made me feel a little safer about that -- it's not something I'd want going back into my eventual drinking water.
Obviously though, that all depends on what you work with. Here, I deal with lots o' crap that cannot be poured down the drain, no matter how diluted. Or so EH&S tells me, but for all I know, they go out back and dump it in the grass once they collect all my carefully stored containers of waste.
OHG we too have no drains under the safety showers which leads to flood and ceiling damage for the floors beneath. Also no hand wash stations by the doors...
My favorite part of this is when someone, you know, spills some deadly chemical on themselves and I HAVE to help them or go to Hell or H&S jail-I will soon be standing in 1' of said deadly chemical not suspended in aqueous media. Awesome
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