• Question: In your industry or work place has anything ever gone really really wrong?

    Asked by Mia.kittie,13 to Dave, Ed, Guido, Hugh, Stef on 9 Mar 2015. This question was also asked by Ellie.
    • Photo: Dave Bond

      Dave Bond answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Hi Mia,

      Well depends what you think realy wrong is….. We have not created mutant spiders or killed anyone. Realy wrong for me is when no one can work because the scientific computing has failed. This is always stressfull as a visiting scientist may not make a discovery if they cannot work and their booked time expires, because of not having computing avaliable.

      In terms of going wrong in a more odd sence. We once had a liquid nitrogen leak in one of the beamlines, (this is where the experiments take place). Unfortunalty one of the detector machines that acts like a camera that can see x rays got in the way. I was asked to go and look and because the next day we had visiting scientists booked in this needed to work again. You can imagine that liquid nitrogen and computers do not mix well.
      After about an hour of it warming up, we powered it back on and waited for the bang. Fortunatly it did not happen, and a further hour later of reconfiguring and checking it was working again.

    • Photo: Ed Rial

      Ed Rial answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Hi Mia

      Interesting question 😉

      Fortunately at Diamond nothing has gone so badly wrong that anyone has died (although there’s been the odd broken bone). Diamond is so boringly safe that the British Safety Council gave us an actual sword! (That the company locked up in a plastic case so we don’t get to play with it 🙁 ).

      However in the industry of particle accelerators there have been some interesting accidents. There is a Russian called Anatoli Bugorski who put his head in the way of a stream of protons forty years ago. His face was half paralysed but he survived! He even kept working as a physicist and got a PhD!

      Cheers

      Ed

    • Photo: Hugh Harvey

      Hugh Harvey answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      In medicine we try and keep our patients very safe from harm, after all, we are supposed to make them better.

      But one time someone did hurt themselves inside our MRI machine. The MRI is a big huge magnet that is used to take medical pictures. Because it is a magnet it attracts metal, and this one person came into the room wearing some metal, and they got sucked towards the machine and broke their ankle!

      After that we chnaged our safety warnings so that this accident doesn’t happen again!

    • Photo: Mariastefania De Vido

      Mariastefania De Vido answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Hello Mia!

      Nice question!

      If with “really really wrong” you mean injuries to people or major explosions, no luckily nothing like that has ever happened.

      In my lab safety comes first and much attention is put in avoiding bad things to happen: we have interlock systems which make lasers go off if an unauthorized person opens the door, gas detection systems to check if there is a dangerous gas leak and so on…

      From time to time we have minor problems, like issues with optical components in the laser which prevent the system to work properly and which we have to fix.

      Cheers

      Stefania

    • Photo: Guido Bolognesi

      Guido Bolognesi answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      Hi Mia,

      thanks for the question. That’s a good one 😉

      So far, nothing has ever gone really wrong in the sense someone got injured.
      Safety is extremely important in our work. High power lasers can be very dangerous indeed. I am currently working in a Chemistry Department and chemical stuff as well can be very dangerous for human health. So we make
      all efforts to avoid accidents.

      However, things can go wrong in other ways. Back in 2010, I was doing my Ph.D. studies in France. It was summer and it was very hot. So hot, that from time to time there were electrical power outage. You might know, that is no good for a computer to suddenly cut the power, as this can
      irreversibly destroy its electrical components (such as the memory).

      Well, what happened is that the computer where I stored all the experimental data, which I collected in the previous 4-5 months, failed and it was no longer working. It was a kind of a living drama for me. I was about to say goodbye to the work I had been doing in the past months. Fortunately, there was a IT guy working in my office who spent a lot of time to recover the computer memory, even though that had been damaged by the power outage. At the end, I managed to recover 90% of my data.
      Lucky me!! So things did not go really really wrong that time but we were not far from it.

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