Fire in the Lab (or Dementia Fires My Mind)

Many years ago I worked in a lab where I was required to do ether (that is di-ethyl ether, the very flammable organic chemical) extractions on a cottony material called cigarette tow (cig tow: not really cotton but fibrous cellulose acetate). You might have figured out by now that cig tow has something to do with cigarettes: it does, it is the filter material. During the manufacturing process, the cellulose acetate fibers are coated with a light oil then brought together to form a band which could contain as many as 75 000 individual fibers. This band was then mechanically crimped to hold the fibers together in preparation for layering in very long baling containers. My job was to take a weighed sample of this cig tow, stuff it into a flask, add ether, then connect the flask to a distillation apparatus, which was then steam-heated for a time, until the distillation was completed. This "time" quite often depended on my waking hour after I started the distillation (night shift thing, you know). We used steam for obvious reasons which I will state here because I love stating the obvious: open flame and ether DO NOT MIX!

I was basically extracting the oil off the cig tow to determine the % Oil because we had a specification which we needed to stick by (pun intended) for oil application (too much oil = increased costs). Once the distillation process was complete (read: I became "aware again"), I had to remove the tow sample from the flask and then put the sample into a FIRE-PROOF oven for drying. Did I mention that open flame and ether DO NOT MIX unless, of course, you mean them to? Well, unless you intend to ignite ether, then the use of an open flame near ether vapors is highly interesting...the combination generates all kind of interesting activities and intense excitement. Toss in a dose of night shift and you get a real circus of events. Anyway, the idea was to safely remove the highly flammable ether from the tow sample. Once the tow sample was properly dried, I was then required to weigh it and use that number to calculate the % Oil. You probably think you know where this story is going and you might be right, but as with all journeys, it isn’t the destination that matters, it’s how I got there that makes me laugh now. Y’all might as well join in the laughs, which is why I am writing this story.
Let me now interrupt this technical chatter (as if you have any say in the matter...hah, it rhymes) to write about the physical and mental effects of working a 12-hour rotating night/day work schedule. Working a swing shift, as this rotating work schedule is called, generally wreaks havoc on the circadian rhythm...that bio-chemical process in the brain which regulates our sleep/waking patterns via the naturally produced chemical identified by brainiac scientists as “melatonin”. Most folks can manage the swing shift quite well most of the time but there are those inevitable ugly times when the body and brain absolutely do not get along well with each other. The body might say something to the brain like, "Dude, I need to sleep...what the hell, eh?"...or vice-versa. The brain and the body are like a quartering wave combined with a poorly adjusted rudder: it becomes time to swim (for me anyway, eh, Malcolm!). The brain thinks money, the body wants sleep. Sometimes both are out of kilter and neither can decide what either wants...this is the time when the circadian rhythm is at its worst – this was me during the night I write of.
Well, let’s just say that the night I am writing about was one of those awful nights when consciousness was not a concept I understood very well. I was so brain-dead that a doctor could have cut off my head to make a Frankenstein in Liechtenstein and I would not have noticed that he took it from me. I was already bagged at 0100h when I began the sample prep for this ether distillation and worse off when I finished the distillation at 0400h. I had a really disturbed nap during the distillation which only caused the brain fog in my head to thicken. When I got off my chair to attend to the ether-wet sample I was wobbly-legged, my shoulders were hunched way more than usual and my eyes felt scratchy and severely slitted.

I managed to successfully remove the flask from the distillation apparatus after closing off the steam supply valve and even managed to decant any remaining ether into a waste container. The sample was still in the flask and not in the waste container only because it was all fluffed up into a nice poofy ball which was too big to fit through unless tugged at with tweezers – at least gravity wouldn’t mess with my head this night. That saved me from losing my sample because I certainly was not fully attuned to what I was doing at that time. At least I didn’t start a fire or anything, eh...that would be bad, very bad indeed. From there I took my flask to the work bench and prepared a clean glass dish to set my sample upon. I tugged my sample from the flask using tweezers and stood there looking at it, thinking....thinking...what do I do next with this...it was already 0430, I was tired...I just wanna get this thing dry fast...real fast, so I can go back to sleep. If I do this test properly then I would have to let it dry in the over for one hour, that would mean 0530, then I would have to let it cool properly, another 20 minutes or so, then calculate a result and send it off to ops...another 5 minutes. Too much time, there has to be another way I thinks to myself.

As it happens, we tended to have a Bunsen burner fired up most of the time in a fume hood. We used the Bunsen burner for ashing samples to determine titanium dioxide % in certain samples. A fume hood is a raised box (for those of you who do not know) which has suction applied by an overhead fan. The fan is explosion proof. I applied some seriously muddled thought to the OPEN FLAME and thought that if I could somehow hold the ether-wetted tow sample just high enough above the flame then I could maybe...just maybe...dry my sample a little quicker.

Yep, I grabbed some fireproof metal tongs and with them suspended my tow sample, flammable in of itself, over the flame, starting from a high point and finding just that perfect point at which it might dry quickly. Well, well, well...I did indeed find the ideal height to hold that very flammable mass of ether and cig tow...the ideal height to have it suddenly burst into flames before my wide eyes. That friggin flame jumped up a good foot before I realized what was happening. All disasters considered, all was not lost at this point. All I had to do was put the fire out and my sample could be saved and dried properly in the oven since only the ether was being consumed by fire and not my sample...not yet. My most immediate concern was to look around to see if anyone had wandered into the lab...nope, no one around...I could now figure out what to do with this burning ball of fire.
Normally (as in with adequate restfulness), I can think of a decent workable solution to a problem in seconds or less. That fateful night, considering the brain fog I was experiencing, my uningenious solution was discovered after not more than 15 seconds. I heroically managed not to panic about the situation (at least y’all know that about me) and fairly quickly decided that the best solution was to remove my flaming tongs (I couldn’t see my sample after those thinking seconds) from the fume hood (where it was safest to let the burn continue) and tossed my ignited sample onto the lab floor. I stared dumbly at the growing yellow licks of fire and decided that this new scenario would not do at all. If someone came into the lab now not only would my sample be cooked but my goose as well.
Here is where logic not only defied me most cruelly but left me alone in the room in a rather absolute manner. Ordinarily, when one sees a fire where it does not belong and said fire is small enough, say about the size of a shoe print, one steps on it to deprive the fire of oxygen. The lack of oxygen is normally enough to stop the oxidation reaction known as burning. This action generally works quite well unless you are putting your foot on a puddle of burning gasoline or, perhaps...some other flammable and very malleable organic material like an ether-soaked ball of cig tow. Well, I jammed my foot on that quietly burning little ball of tow on the lab floor fully expecting to deprive it of all the oxygen in the world. The reaction I got in response to my foot stomping from that vindictive tow ball was in blatant disregard to my utmost desire at that time and quite an obvious reaction to any well-educated and fully conscious scientist type: the ether in that little ball squished out of the tow and flowed out to the edges of my shoe where it promptly vaporized to form a cloud of potential BTUs around not only my shoe but somewhat up my leg. All the remaining free-flowing ether from that little ball of fuzz immediately caught fire again but this time, instead of a contained ball of fire dangling from metal tongs in a fume hood, I had a vision-blurring, leg-crawling flame which suddenly looked like it was reaching up to blind my tired eyes while it attempted to consume my shoes and pant legs. My next step was exactly that...I stomped down repeatedly on that little ball and each time I did so, more ether squished out of it and bigger flames seemed to engulf my shoe and leg. During all the time I was doing the, er...Safety Dance on the ball of flaming fuzz, I was looking back and forth in the lab to see if anyone might witness my sad actions for that night. There were two entry doors into the lab so I had to look one way then look exactly the other way, over and over again while I attempted to put this issue to rest once and for all. To put all of your biggest concerns to rest here and now, I was wearing a fire resistant lab coat, so my torso was relatively safe from a potential searing.

I did the safety dance for only a few seconds (stomp rate about 2 per second) because with every stomp I landed on that tow ball, I was becoming more awake and more aware that I was not quite in control of the situation and, of course, the longer I danced on fire, the greater the chances were that some idiot would walk into the lab and say something stupid like, “Holy shit, Batman...what the hell is going on in here?” Just as soon as I realized that I was really really awake, I understood that this process needed to come to an abrupt end. From somewhere (I no longer remember where), I procured a sheet of something not flammable and gently set it on the still burning and much flatter mass of tow: the flames disappeared immediately. At this point, I did not throw caution to the wind and immediately remove the flat sheet but left it there for a few more seconds to make certain that no flames lived to rat me out to anyone. Had anyone walked into the lab at this point and asked me what I was doing, standing there looking at a flat piece of whateveritwas, I planned my lie carefully. I was gonna say to them, “Oops, I dropped this flat thingy, I must be tired.” Then I was gonna just leave it there on the floor, distract them with chatter as I gently guided them out of the lab, then remove it and the evidence it was covering up to where no one would ever see it: the tow recycling bin. I would bury the slightly singed tow ball deep inside the bin where no one would see it.

Once I was satisfied that it was safe to clean things up a little, I found a new sample, restarted the distillation and thanked the gods that I would not be around to see the final result. I never said a word to anyone about this incident...ohhh, that is too strong a word for what happened...this occurance, until after I was laid off from the company back in 2005. Some secrets are worth keeping secret, some are worth laughing about...but that is hindsight talking.
Robert N Pruden