Responding to a spill

Purpose

To get a spill off the bench and into a container, without spreading it, without making a dust or a vapour of it, and without it reaching a drain.

When to use it

The moment anything is on a surface, a floor, a garment or a person that should not be. Small spills included: the routine exists so that it runs without thought on the day the spill is not small.

This page is the common core, and steps 1 to 4 are the same whatever spilled. Four of this course’s own reagents then need a different answer, for reasons the incompatibility matrix gives, and each carries its own page: a spilled solid, which is lifted dry and never brushed; an acid spill, where the containers move before the absorbent does; an alkali spill, which is never wetted and never neutralised where it lies; and a silver nitrate spill, which is collected rather than mopped and never left to dry. Read step 1, then go to the page for what is on the floor.

!A person comes before a bench

If any of it reached skin, an eye or a mouth, stop reading this and treat the exposure first. The first aid quick reference is the page for that, and the two actions that matter — get water onto it, and keep it there — are the ones people cut short.

Before you start

You should already have read the small-spill routine and the spill-kit list on protecting yourself, and know which of the streams on the bench cannot meet each other, from the incompatibility matrix.

In the kit, within reach of the wet bench: absorbent granules or mats; an impervious apron; new nitrile gloves of 0.4 mm — heavier than the ones you work in, and unused; containers and bags for the loaded absorbent, which is hazardous waste; eye protection; a jug of clean water; a marker and a label for the bag; and the safety data sheets, which are where the response for a particular product lives.

Procedure

1. Stop. Set down what you are holding, upright, and say out loud what has spilled so that anybody else in the room knows what it is — and so that you have named which of the four reagent pages above applies before you touch anything.
2. Decide whether this is a spill you clean up at all — before touching it. Leave it if you cannot reach its edge without walking through it; if it is a concentrate rather than a working solution; if it is making a vapour or a smell that makes you want to leave; if it has reached an electrical outlet or an appliance; or if you find yourself hesitating.
3. If you are leaving: get out, close the door, ventilate from outside the room if you can do it from outside, and get advice with the product name and its data sheet in your hand.
4. If you are staying: eye protection on, then new heavier gloves — not the contaminated pair you are wearing — and the apron.
5. A solid spill is collected dry, first. Lift it with a card or a scoop into a closed container, worked slowly and close to the surface so as not to raise a dust. Do not brush it and do not wet it: water turns a contained solid spill into a spreading liquid one.
6. A liquid spill is absorbed from the edge inwards, with granules or a mat, so that it does not travel. Never a dry cloth, which pushes it outwards and loads the cloth.
7. Lift the loaded absorbent into a bag or tub and close it.
8. Take up the residue with one damp disposable wipe, after the bulk has been lifted rather than instead of lifting it.
9. Wash the surface with a small volume of water and collect that rinse. A large volume only makes more contaminated liquid for you to store.
10. Route what you have collected. Anything silver-bearing goes to the silver-bearing waste container; everything else to the container for its own stream; loaded absorbent, wipes and gloves into the sealed bag, which is labelled and does not go into an open bin.
11. Check under and behind whatever the spill ran towards, along the lip of the bench, and on your shoes.
12. Take the gloves off by the removal sequence, into the bag, and wash your hands.
13. Write it down.

How you know it worked

• Nothing wet remains, including under the tray, behind the bottles and along the bench lip.
• The loaded absorbent, the wipes and the gloves are in a sealed, labelled bag rather than an open bin, and nothing has been left to dry.
• The rinse water was collected, and the drain took none of it.
• Nobody is still wearing the gloves that were on when it happened.
• The notebook entry exists and names one thing you would change.

If a step fails

Step 2, you cannot decide whether to leave. Leave. The criteria are deliberately generous, and the cost of leaving a small spill for twenty minutes is a session, while the cost of staying with a large one is not a session.

Step 4, the kit has no unused gloves in it. That is a failure of opening the laboratory rather than of this procedure. Use the best you have, keep the contact time very short, change often, and restock before the next session — then fix step 10 of the opening list so it does not recur.

Step 5, you have already wet a solid spill. It is a liquid spill now. Carry on at step 6 and expect to collect several times the volume.

Step 6, the spill has reached the floor. Contain the outer edge first, then work inwards. Check your shoes before you walk anywhere, because the second contamination event is usually a footprint.

Step 9, the surface is porous. Washing lifts what is on it and not what soaked in. Wash it, collect the rinse, and then record the surface as contaminated and cover or seal it before the next session rather than trusting it.

Step 10, you cannot say which stream it belongs to. Give it a container of its own, labelled with the date, the process and the word unidentified. Do not tip it into a labelled stream to tidy it away; that turns one unknown into a whole bottle of unknown.

At any point, some of it reaches you. Stop the clean-up. Treat the exposure, and come back to the bench afterwards — a spill waits and an eye does not.

What to record

What was spilled, how much, at what strength, where, and what you were doing when it happened. Then what you did, what went into which container and in what volume, and one sentence on what you would change. This is a notebook entry rather than a confession: the value of it is entirely in the last sentence.