I also think you would find that most universities had lab safety courses, committees, procedures, etc., at various times over the years. I know we did. The take-home message to me is that these things happen mostly on a grass-roots level when safety gets lax and then they die out after a while, only to reappear later for the same reasons. Unless the process becomes institutionalized (baked into policies and job descriptions, incorporated into state/federal laws with teeth) we are doomed to repeating the cycle over the decades in response to the next disaster.