According to an open letter from Texas Tech President Duane Nellis and Sr. Vice President for Research Robert V. Duncan, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board has closed its investigation of a 2010 explosion inside the Tech Chemistry Building. Nellis and Duncan said the university was asked to increase the overall safety plan for labs and create a near-miss reporting system.
The explosion seriously injured a student.
A previous CSB report said, “On January 7, 2010, a graduate student within the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at Texas Tech University (Texas Tech) lost three fingers, his hands and face were burned, and one of his eyes was injured after the chemical he was working with detonated.”
The text of the entire letter follows:
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) has accepted Texas Tech’s changes to improve laboratory safety and officially has closed its investigation into a 2010 accident that left a chemistry graduate student seriously injured.
This is good news for our campus and is the result of your hard work and dedication to developing a strong, positive safety culture. Staff, students, faculty and administrators have worked to change our expectations about the safety needs of our work and about how we act on those needs.
After the accident, the CSB made two specific recommendations about changes Texas Tech needed to make. First, we needed to expand our overall safety plan for labs, studios and research sites to include physical safety hazards and to ensure that all members of our community are aware of the safety plan. Second, we needed to create a near-miss reporting system so that our entire community can benefit from the ‘lessons learned’ when unexpected problems occur in any one of our 800+ labs and studios.
Both of these recommendations have been met. We also have instituted many other changes that were laid out after the accident.
Many groups on campus have worked on these changes – especially the faculty-led Institutional Laboratory Safety Committee. We made our most recent report to the CSB in April 2015, and on June 1, the board voted to accept our work and changed the status of their recommendations to Texas Tech to “closed – acceptable action.”
Safety is an integral part of all our activities at Texas Tech. We want to thank you for your hard work and encourage you to continue to think and act safely.
Sincerely,
M. Duane Nellis, President
Robert V. Duncan, Sr. Vice President for Research
