12 hospitalized after industrial accident...

[Zaphod Q. IX]

Link to the news story.
Not very impressive or important you might say. Who cares, right? Well it scared the crap out of me. My mother works there. After I saw the news story, I called her. She said, "Oh yeah...I probably should have called you."
-_-

Luckily, she was off work at the time. She did, however, get to spend an entire day cleaning up the chemical spill...which she told me was caused by an explosion. She's on the Emergency Response Team at the plant, which means she's trained for crap like that. The guy that suffered the worst chemical burns is a friend of hers. She said he'll probably lose his sight. All in all, not things I like to hear.

[mikeron]

They have all kinds of crazy stuff in circuit board processing plants. My dad used to tell me stories about the permanganate etching baths that made me quite certain that I wanted nothing to do with chemistry. It's good to hear that your mom's okay, and that nobody was killed.

[Freedom]

Yea, that etch is bad stuff.
I worked in a circuit board manufacturing company for a couple years, and was in a room when a drum of Peroxide, of all things, exploded.
Nobody ever could figure out why it just went up the way it did, peroxide isn't considered to be volatile, and it was setting by itself out in the middle of the floor in normal temperatures.
It was in the room where they do the etching, and I always kind of suspected it was the fumes from that in the air that caused the reaction.

[King Aquamentus]

The worst chemical I've really had to deal with on a working basis was a diluted nitric compound. It's built to ignore hard and soft grounds applied to a zinc plate, so you can scrape lines into the ground and have the acid carve them onto the plate. (these plates are used in printmaking).

I've been exposed to stronger agents before, once was medical and the other was just silly me. I was treated for ingrown toenails by having an acid destroy the ingrown portions. Those will probably never be able to grow again, but I don't really mind. And you can't really tell anyways. The other incident? Dishwasher gel. I apparently got some on my finger and didn't notice until it started stinging.

[Aegix Drakan]

Wow... I'm glad your mom wasn't hurt, andthat no one was killed...

But your mom's friend has my sympathies...Losing sight is not a funny thing...

[Russ]

Wow. Well, am glad your Mom's not injured. Gosh, that guy loosing his sight. *shivers*. What chemicals were spilled anyways?