21 People Are Revealing The Massive Near-Misses They Experienced, And My Hands Are Shaking

5.

“I worked as a graduate student in a chemistry lab that dealt with some… unstable… chemicals if mishandled. We have a graduate student who was fairly lax with their handling of these chemicals. We were both working late in the lab, and I left early for a social event the school was hosting while they stayed behind. The protocol is that you needed two people in the lab at any given time for safety. I told them I was going, and they said they would be right behind me.”

“2 hours later the most experienced chemist on the campus came in for their night shift, and the other student had apparently accidentally put about 3 kg of chemicals drying over a flame and left them, thinking they would just dry out. However, what they were working with turned into a contact explosive, and if I or the other grad student had tried to handle it, we would have likely exploded the entire lab, but the chemist was able to “defuse” the situation.” 

— u/whinis