How to prepare for a lab-tastrophe

https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/how-to-prepare-for-a-lab-catastrophe/4017740.article

‘I felt soul crushed when I walked in and saw water flooding everything,’ explains Kristin Hutchins, an associate chemistry professor at Texas Tech University in the US. ‘I was pre-tenure at the time and I [immediately though about] what manuscripts were going to be delayed.’ It was February 2021, and Texas had been hit by a brutal winter storm that froze pipes at several chemistry institutions. A frozen water pipe in the lab above Hutchins’ had burst, flooding her lab. The damaged equipment – an analytical balance and a ball mill for mechanochemistry – were easily replaced. It was the loss of samples that hit hardest.

Samples in open vials had lined a bench the length of Hutchins’ lab as they awaited crystallisation. ‘We had a whole wall of crystallisation vials that were filled with water that had fallen from the ceiling,’ she explains. Everything had to be remade. Compounds that were sensitive to water hydrolysed and turned black, while crystals that appeared unharmed were still unusable since the conditions they grew under couldn’t be reproduced. The lab was back on track after a few months of hard work, including using a pestle and mortar while waiting for the new ball mill to arrive. ‘I was fortunate that I had students who were so motivated and excited about our work,’ Hutchins says.
The ice cores were just in a puddle on the floor

Not all samples are so easily replaceable. In April 2017, a freezer malfunction at the University of Alberta’s then-brand-new Canadian ice core archive facility caused 180m of ice cores collected from the Canadian Arctic to melt. ‘These are very valuable cores that cost a lot of money and resources to drill and scientifically are priceless,’ explains Alison Criscitiello, currently the director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab. Ice cores are long cylinders of ice that contain gas bubbles, chemical isotopes and other clues as to how the climate has changed throughout history. The 12 ice cores in the archive contain more than 80,000 years of atmospheric history, and around 12% of this ice was destroyed by the freezer malfunction. ‘This incident… rules out certain studies that we might have wanted to conduct on the cores, such as reconstructing continuous long-term histories,’ Martin Sharp, who was then the research lead for the archive, said at the time.

The archive had only arrived at the University of Alberta a few months before the incident. It was stored in two room-sized freezers in a building which had not yet been occupied, so no one was around to notice the problem. Additionally, the freezer’s alarm system failed. The issue was eventually discovered when the freezer’s interior became so hot that the building’s fire alarm went off. By then, the cores were ‘just in a puddle on the floor’, says Criscitiello.The freezer alarm system has since been upgraded. ‘There was only one monitoring and alarm system at the time – we now have four,’ Criscitiello says. But the increase in the ferocity of extreme weather events in recent years has posed a new challenge for the archive: campus-wide power outages. Criscitiello says back-up generators cannot keep such large freezers at –26°C, so she purchased a 72-foot (22m) temporary freezer that is permanently parked on the archive’s driveway. ‘It runs on diesel a!
nd freezes down below zero in 40 minutes,’ she says. An on-call team of faculty and staff move the ice into the temporary freezer when the campus loses power. Before the trailer was brought, the campus had never lost power in a storm. But since then, it was happened twice – most recently in May.

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