Safety Showers Were in UCI Lab Design : Accident: ‘Regrettable’ delay in installation led to building’s opening before they were done. A student badly burned by acid ran past the backup system.

A UC Irvine environmental health official said Friday that safety showers were included in the original design for the Physical Science Building, where a graduate student was seriously burned by spilled chemicals, but that there was a “regrettable” delay in their installation.

Bill Smirl, director of environmental health and safety, said the design for the building called for the overhead safety showers but they were not fully installed when the building was occupied in August. Installation of the shower drains began several weeks before the building opened, and workers now are laboring “feverishly” to finish putting the showers in, he said.

The incomplete installation of the state-required showers was noticed when the building was inspected before its opening, Smirl said. Still, the backup system of hand-held “drench hoses” placed at every lab sink--and instruction about their use during a four-hour safety course required for all students and staff--was considered adequate protection while the shower installation continued, he said.

This backup system provides three or four drench hoses in each lab, while the overhead showers will number one per wing, Smirl said. “Any implication that the buildings are substandard is inaccurate,” he said. “Our system was not foolproof but it was sufficient. . . . The breakdown occurred when the student panicked.”

The graduate student, Kate Sorenson, sustained first- and second-degree burns on her legs Sept. 23 when she spilled nitric acid while using the corrosive chemical as a cleaning agent. She has said she did not follow certain safety procedures, such as wearing a protective apron. While the drench hose was close at hand, her first instinct was to run for a safety shower, she said.

Part of an inorganic chemistry team that came to UCI this summer with Prof. Nancy Doherty from the University of Washington in Seattle, Sorenson had gone through the safety course a week earlier. New to Irvine, she was accustomed to running to the safety showers, and forgot to reach for the pull-out nozzles at the sink when the spill occurred, she said. Finding no overhead shower, she ran next door and was hosed down by someone in another lab, she said.

State codes require overhead showers, which can be activated by the single push of a button or pull of a handle, to be located every 100 feet--or no farther than 10 seconds away--in laboratories. That standard will result in one shower on each of the five floors of the laboratories, Smirl said. The drench hoses, while located closer in the labs, must be held by hand.

Smirl said the University of California system is one of the few in the nation that requires an extensive safety training course for laboratory students.

“Our accident record in laboratory safety has been excellent in the university system,” Smirl said. “We would have liked the showers to have been in when the building was occupied . . . but we did have a backup.”