A post-Flixborough risk assessment
In the last 50 years, attitudes to safety have improved so that first-hand experience of lab incidents is now rare
There is no substitute for experience in the laboratory. You can’t really be taught it in a classroom, it must be built up over time as you pass from novice to practitioner before becoming an expert. This poses something of a dilemma for those of us who work in chemistry safety – we would like our colleagues to be experts in safety and yet we don’t ever want them to experience truly being unsafe.
As we mark 50 years on from the Flixborough disaster in which 28 people were killed and 36 seriously injured in a chemical plant explosion, it feels like an appropriate time to reflect on the current state of safety in the workplace for chemists and other laboratory professionals. Five decades passing has seen unimaginable changes in how we work in the laboratory and industry, and yet the core concept of a chemist persists.