Quote:
Originally Posted by Horsebox
Today in the lab I was walking with a beaker of concentrated HCl which was pretty stupid (they don't keep it in the fume hood for nothing) and although I had it nowhere near my face I got a whiff of the fumes. It reminded me of smelling vinegar. I didn't inhale enough to do any damage to myself but I'm wondering how dangerous inhaling fumes from concentrated acids are. I'd say I was fairly lucky. I inhaled enough for it to give me a fright but it didn't burn my nose lining or anything. Lucky I breath through my nose if it was my mouth I mightn't have noticed.
Its easy to get lulled into a false sense of security when you've dealt with conc. acids plenty of times and never had any trouble. Also HCl doesn't really have a reputation for being dangerous but this stuff will burn a hole right through your hand just as fast as H2SO4 will. I washed out the beaker with water and there were visible fumes rising out of it. I have new respect for HCl.
Have any of you had any accidents involving acids? I've yet to burn myself with acid but I've had some mild NaOH burns over the years.
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lost a lab coat, skin on my finger tips and have a characteristic chest scar due to various acids. Ive never had an unintentional devastating accident. But more than a fair share of minor incidents. The latest being an attempt to make a better bleach which i wrote about in the bs thread. The best story is the use of a Mg-Pd catalyst to clean contaminated water supplies. This evolves a lot of hydrogen gas when done on large scale, and is also exothermic. If your stirring apparatus slows and the hydrogen gas is allowed to pool, prepare for shock wave. This was a scale up of a technique shown to work on 125ml samples... to a 16L size. the unfortunate tech was thrown back wards as well as the two observers. Luckily as the lid was open the glass was only cracked and slightly damaged instead of being a pressure bomb if it had been in a necked vessel.
Concentrated acid fumes
