Lab safety comes back to bite us

In my lab I am the designated safety-worrier. Many of my labmates couldn't care less about safety (is that a cultural thing? it seems worse with the foreign students...). Anyways, parts of my lab are, well, basically disaster areas. The room where we have two of our fume hoods, for instance, is particularly bad. The picture here is not my actual lab, but it really isn't that far off from what our fume hood actually looks like. I've learned to just let some of that stuff slide--it's not my job to be the safety police or anything. But every now and then, I have to put my foot down.

When I first joined the lab, for instance, I learned that some members of my lab were using HF (hydrofluoric acid) with hardly any safety precautions--no goggles, no secondary container, no antidote anywhere nearby. For those of your who don't know, HF is a super-duper dangerous chemical that can easily kill you upon contact with your skin and which also gives off very toxic fumes. A palm-sized splash of HF on your skin, and you'll be dead by the next morning. I used to work with HF at BYU, and I had to wear safety glasses, a face shield, a labcoat, apron, and three layers of gloves. And I ALWAYS worked in a fume hood, and I ALWAYS had the HF antidote nearby. So that was one thing I decided to throw a fit about, and I got our lab to use secondary containers and stock the antidote and such. Not too long ago, we discovered one of the secondary containers totally full of an unkown concentrated acid because a bottle had broken, which actually turned out NOT to be HF (thankfully). And luckily, it was at least contained in that tub instead of leaking all over the room. But what if it had been HF and we hadn't had those secondary containers I insisted on--it could have killed someone! Or several someones.

Anyways, back to my point. Today was another day of me feeling vindicated for feeling anal about this safety stuff. A co-worker of mine was getting something out of the flammables cabinet, and because that thing is full to the utter brink with bottles hanging halfway off the edges, he accidentally knocked a bottle off the shelf as he was closing the door. It broke, and he started cleaning it up, only to start feeling dizzy and short of breath. Turns out it was very corrosive chemical with some moderately nasty fumes. We called the campus safety people and they came to check it out. Luckily, it was just like 10 mL or something, so it wasn't a huge deal, although they told my co-worker he should probably go to the doctor just to make sure everything was okay.

So, as soon as my advisor gets back from vacation, I'm going to have a talk with him about making some of my labmates clean up their work areas. The problem with bringing stuff like this up to my advisor is that he generally turns around and assigns you to be the one to fix it. But not this time--the messy ones are going to have to clean up after themselves!