The Pipe To Nowhere
I work in a flashy new building. Built in 2005 and chock full of float glass and maple, it definitely says “science happens here”. The problem is that it was also built by the lowest bidder, so it also says “bullshit happens here”. For example, only half of the lightbulbs in our lab were installed when we moved in, presumably to save money. We had to request to get an upgrade from mood lighting mode. Even with all the bulbs, there are still no lights above our desks (it’s not like we read and write there) so we all hang lamps from the duct work just to be able to see after sunset. This is just sort of inconvenient, but last Friday the shoestring budget on which this building was built and continues to run became very obvious in a very dangerous way.
One of my colleagues, a first-year who had just moved into his hood, set up two reactions in tandem to run overnight. Both were in THF at reflux and he had the two water condensers daisy-chained and flowing gently into the sink at the back of his hood. Content that his solvent would stay a’bubblin’ and a’condensin’ all night, he left to go do what grad students do with their spare time (drink heavily or sleep as the situation may require).
The next day around 10 in the morning our lab got a panicked call from the building manager, to his credit an extremely nice and helpful dude. He asked if we had any water running in our lab because the lab directly below us had noticed water coming through the ceiling. It was hard to miss since it was less of a leak and more of a downpour. We’re talking thousands of dollars worth of damage to the floor below us and the floor below that. So we shut off the condenser flow and a few (17) maintenance workers, administration and plumbers descended on our lab to see what the problem was. One plumber shined a flashlight down the drain that the water had been draining into only to see a shimmering pool about four feet below the sink. Yeah, that’s right, we had a sink complete with tap and drain but NO FUCKING PIPE attached to it. So for about 16 hours we had been pumping water directly into the firewall. We’ve been using this hood for about a year at this point so no doubt there was also some chronic water damage and probably already a reservoir or used lab-water that helped weaken the drywall and made the sudden shower that much more intense. A safety inspector chastised us immediately for using an open loop to cool our condensers instead of a glycol chiller. Right, because we totally have the space and money for 8 personal chillers when a slow trickle of water will do the trick. Plus, it’s totally unreasonable to assume that our sinks have fucking drain pipes. You’re right man, and you totally shouldn’t go fuck yourself. After 6 hours of hubub and work, we got hooked up with a drain complete with P trap and all and didn’t even get fined for the open loop business. Problem solved, well except for those thousands of dollars I mentioned earlier.
So why was this sink built to piss all over the Biology floors below? The answer is that it wasn’t…originally. Stuck to the wall beside the hood is an innocuous, 2”x3” yellow sign that reads “notice: an elemental mercury spill has occurred in this fume hood”. Big deal, the spill took place at least 4 years ago since the hood was unoccupied for 2 before we moved in. The mercury was cleaned up and that sticker is just the fulfillment of some OSHA regulation. The problem is that when the spill was cleaned up, they had to destroy the drain pipe just in case mercury had found its way into the sink. Wait, I guess that’s not the problem. The problem is really that they didn’t replace the pipe when they were done. Why should they? It’s not like anyone uses the sinks in these hoods anyway. Plus, PVC is expensive and Home Depot is at least a 10 minute drive. Fuck you.
The best part about all this? The water was also leaking into the cabinet below the hood. You know, the one where we keep all the alkali metals. Including kilos of all your favorites, lithium, sodium, and the ever-lively potassium. Seriously….fuck….you. The biologists below us are just lucky that they didn’t walk over to inspect the part of their ceiling that was raining only to be engulfed in the following fireball like they had somehow incurred the wrath of god with their twisted experiments.
