A recently-released study is telling the world that the relatively frequent accidents in China’s university laboratories are, for the most part, the result of human error. But for some in a Nanjing University, it’s all a little too late.
On the afternoon of 24 October last year, an explosion ripped through a lab in the Jiangning campus of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA). Two people died and at least six were injured.
As this publication reported, social media quickly became awash with videos and photos of the unfolding scene. Some showed billowing clouds of smoke from one of the campus buildings, while others depicted a man with burn marks on his skin and the emergency services clearing up in the aftermath.
While the explosion at NUAA was just the latest lab-based accident in China that led to loss of life, it turns out the root causes of such, all across the country, have been largely the same through 2 decades of disasters.
Indeed, Chinese chemists had been calling for improvements to lab safety at research institutions following previous incidents for some time, reported the Global Times immediately after the NUAA incident. That publication said that many chemists feel there has been a “systematic negligence of safety”.
Hence comes the recently released study. Published by the Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, the study looked into a total of 110 accidents in China’s university labs.
While greater, more-open, media coverage has played a positive role in increasing the awareness of common hazards in labs, many such deficiencies remain to be addressed.
In particular, lab-safety management appears to be particularly lax. According the study’s abstract, “It was found that human factors were the most contributing cause and the training element was a vulnerable competency in laboratory-safety management”.
The study, led by researchers from China University of Petroleum’s College of Chemical Engineering in Qingdao, also suggests that top-down and bottom-up approaches may be the key for universities and authorities in their enhancing of safety in the country’s uni labs.
The tragedy of course, is that for those students who lost a friend in the NUAA accident, and those of the other 10 people who died in previous accidents, this all comes a little late. But better than never.
