Serious Safety Gaps Found in Bulk of School Science Labs

The science labs in most secondary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District have serious safety deficiencies, according to recently completed inspections mandated by the City Council.

The inspections of schools from Chatsworth to Huntington Park uncovered a widespread lack of protective eye goggles, broken exhaust fans, the absence of eye-wash stations for emergencies, improper storage facilities for acids and other dangerous chemicals, and many other unsafe conditions.

“The majority need upgrading,” Susie Wong, the school district’s principal safety officer, said Thursday of the labs.

The Los Angeles school board last week approved $1.75 million to improve the school laboratories, although individual schools will be asked to purchase some of the needed equipment with their own funds.

The survey was conducted as part of a broader effort to identify and remove dangerous substances in schools and to properly label and index those that remain, said Jack Waldron, who heads the district’s safety office. The project began in March, after the City Council passed an ordinance requiring the school district to provide the Fire Department with a list of hazardous substances at each campus.

Visited 150 Sites

In the first phase of the project, completed last month, inspectors visited science laboratories at all 150 junior and senior high schools in the district, taking an inventory of chemicals and removing dangerous ones.

They found that the average high school chemistry laboratory contained about 350 chemicals--some dating back to the 1960s, and others in leaking, unlabeled or corroded containers--including a wide variety of toxic, cancer-causing or explosive compounds, the safety officials said.

“Along with the initial inventory of chemicals, we had crews take inspections of the facilities,” Wong said. That led to the discovery that most of the schools lack a wide range of important safety features, she said.

According to a sample of 64 inspection reports on high school labs provided by Wong, more than half of the “exhaust hoods” in the labs were found to be broken.

These are ventilated, glass-fronted cabinets in which experiments using hazardous chemicals are supposed to be performed so any fumes will be drawn off.

Wong said many of the cabinets are used simply for storage; in such cases, experiments are performed in the open classroom, she said.

Storage Troubling

“Another thing that was really troubling to me was improper storage,” she said. In many cases, chemicals were stored in alphabetical order rather than by type--flammables in one place, acids in another, for instance, she said.

Most of the funds for upgrading laboratories will go toward the purchase of storage facilities, such as special cabinets for acids and earthquake-resistant shelving, she said.

At least 14 of the high schools, including Chatsworth, North Hollywood, Fairfax and South Gate had no eye goggles, Wong said, or the goggles “were in such bad shape that they couldn’t use them anyway.”

At 25 high schools out of the 64, inspectors found food stored in laboratory refrigerators that were meant to hold only biological specimens and chemicals.

Wong said 28 of the high schools had no eye-wash stations, special sinks that spray a stream of water into the eyes, flushing out any contaminant.

“At the very minimum, they should have at least an eye-wash station,” she said.

First-Aid Kits Lacking

Forty of the 64 high schools--including Sylmar, Van Nuys, Granada Hills, Chatsworth and Canoga Park--had no first-aid kits in their science laboratories, according to the reports.

The worst offenders, according to the inspection reports, were Fairfax, Garfield, Ramona and Johnson high schools. Science laboratories at these schools lacked working fume hoods, separate storage of flammable chemicals or acids, first-aid kits, eye-wash stations or eye goggles and earthquake-resistant storage.

The only safety item on the inspectors’ list that every high school laboratory does have is a fire extinguisher, Wong said. That also is the only item required by law under city fire codes, she said.

All of the other safety features are strongly recommended in the 21-year-old Handbook of Safety Rules and Regulations used by Los Angeles city schools.

The safety office had no statistics on accidents in the school science laboratories. Reports of such accidents are not separated from those on other school accidents, Wong said.

Unexpected Problem Arises

The first phase of the safety survey, the inventory of chemicals at schools and disposal of dangerous or unidentified materials, created an unexpected problem in May, Waldron said.

City fire and health officials discovered that too much hazardous material removed from schools had accumulated at the Science Materials Center, a small building in Van Nuys that acts as a repository for classroom chemicals.

“We didn’t anticipate how successful we would be,” Waldron said. “It just got ahead of us.”

The next phase will be to relabel the remaining containers with bar codes that can be read by an electronic scanner so that the school system can maintain a computerized index of types and ages of chemical supplies at various schools, Wong said.

After that, the district will upgrade the facilities, improving ventilation and storage, she said.