Lab Work Touches Off Blast, Fire at UC Irvine

Three people were injured and two buildings evacuated when an explosion ripped through a UC Irvine chemistry lab Monday, sparking a four-alarm fire.

The explosion happened just before 4 p.m. in a second-floor lab in Frederick Reines Hall, blowing out three windows and spreading to an adjacent lab, said Dennis Shell, spokesman for the Orange County Fire Authority. Firefighters also reported flames on the building’s fourth floor, but the extent of the damage was not immediately known, he said.

A building next door with a nuclear reactor in its basement was evacuated as a precaution, Shell said.

A university spokesman said the explosion happened when a graduate student was purifying benzene in a device called a solvent purification still. It was the residue of the purification process, metallic sodium, that apparently caught fire, causing the explosive reaction, spokesman Tom Vasich said.

The graduate student, Cy Fujimoto, 28, of Irvine, was admitted to UCI Medical Center’s burn unit with second-degree burns on his hands, arms and face, Vasich said.

“He was wearing protective goggles, so there was no eye damage,” Vasich said. “He was alert enough to walk out of the building.”

The blaze drew about 100 firefighters from four departments who contained it in about 2 1/2 hours. The concrete building doesn’t have a sprinkler system, Vasich said, because “water wouldn’t work with the chemicals they have in there. The reason there aren’t sprinklers is because they wouldn’t have put the fire out.”

That plus the variety of experiments being conducted in the building and the gas lines in some laboratories proved daunting to firefighters. “The concrete held the heat,” Shell said. “The firefighters took a beating inside the structure, with the amount of heat and black, acrid smoke.”

Mike Long, 41, a 15-year veteran of the Orange County Fire Authority, and Bob Need, 55, a reserve firefighter, were treated at hospitals for heat exhaustion.

The injured student was in stable condition, said Kim Pine, a spokeswoman for UCI Medical Center. “They didn’t seem to be real serious burns,” she said, “but serious enough to be admitted to the burn unit.”

The blast gutted the laboratory of professor William J. Evans. His team of researchers has been exploring the synthesis of polymers, among other areas, according to a Web site maintained by the team.

Lance Pfeifer, a post-doctoral chemistry student, said he was in the lab about five minutes before the explosion and spoke with one of the lab technicians moments afterward. He confirmed that the lab team was using sodium to purify benzene and that the explosion appeared to have occurred when the sodium was removed too quickly, sparking a flash that touched off the flammable benzene.

He said he felt the explosion on the fourth floor.

Steve Govek, 27, a graduate student in chemistry, was working in a nearby lab. “I heard a huge explosion and quickly exited the building,” he said. “We checked to see if it was on our floor. When we saw that it wasn’t, we left.”

Guillaume Belanger, a post-doctoral student who also felt the blast, said, “If you hear a big bang like that in a chemistry lab, you get nervous pretty quickly.”

Reines Hall was named for former UCI professor emeritus Frederick Reines, a 1995 Nobel Prize winner for his research on the existence of neutrinos. The building is home to the university’s physics and astronomy department and a range of high-tech, and high-priced, equipment, including the Aeneas supercomputer.

The extent of damage to that equipment was unknown late Monday, officials said. Firefighters and Hazmat personnel were expected to spend most of the night in the building, which students will not be allowed to reenter until at least Wednesday.

Times staff writers Jason Song and Kimi Yoshino contributed to this story.