Safety

I read on the bus into work today about a pupil in Fife who had been injured whilst his teacher was doing an experiment. Thankfully injuries of this nature are few and far between. Having been in the science business for a number of years it seems to me that it was an exremely unfortunate accident, but still, the pupils father feels the need to sue the education authority for £200,000.

Obviously I dont have the full facts regarding the accident but I have seen glass beakers shatter during acid / metal reactions.It happens when there is a crack in the beaker. These cracks can sometimes be so small they cannot be detected by the naked eye. When zinc is reacted with hydrochloric acid, a certain amount of heat is generated which leads to expansion, the crack means that the expansion of the glass in the beaker does not happen uniformly and this leads to the crack rapidly propagating itself along the fault, this can be mistaken for an "explosion".

If this was the explanation for the incident in Fife then I would be surprised if it could have been avoided. All experiments cannot be carried out behind perspex safety screens and every beaker cannot be microscopically examined for flaws.

It will be interesting to see what a jury makes of it.