high school lab experiment gone wrong

Teacher Burns Student, Ending Two-Year Lull in School Science Accidents

by Connor Michael | Apr 27, 2022 | Lab Safety

One silver lining of the pandemic was that since many school labs were closed, the science-experiment-gone-wrong stories also went on hiatus. For two straight years, there were no reported accidents from teacher-led classroom demonstrations—just a few stories of kids doing dangerous things on their own on TikTok and YouTube.

But that lull came to an end on April 1, 2022, when a middle school teacher in Granbury, Texas, put hand sanitizer on a 12-year-old student's hands and then lit them on fire, leaving the student with third-degree burns. The teacher has since resigned, and the district attorney is deciding whether to seek criminal charges.

“Putting a flammable substance on bare hands and igniting it is not a science experiment. It's just stupid,” an angry parent wrote online. Predictably, school officials claimed the same thing had been done many times before, even that day, without incident.

Online commenters lamented the lack of safety training requirements for teachers—as well as the fundamental lack of basic science education requirements—in most states. Currently in Texas, middle schools can hire teachers who have completed only one introductory science course in college.

Apparently, the hand sanitizer “experiment” was not part of the lesson plan and did not involve administrative review or a thorough risk analysis. Sources told CBS that the incident happened after a class finished a test early and the teacher simply asked students if they wanted to see something “cool.” No one was wearing personal protective equipment.

Due to the obvious risk and liability involved, the light-a-student-on-fire experiment is not to be found in any official science curriculum guides for teachers. However, a quick internet search turns up dozens of videos of people setting their hands on fire with alcohol sanitizer. In a similar incident in 2014, a 23-year-old teacher in Indiana admitted that the idea of lighting students’ hands on fire originated from a YouTube video. That teacher was charged with neglect of a dependent resulting in bodily injury and criminal recklessness.

“Teachers are always looking for ways to make learning more fun and get kids hyped for their lessons, but if your experiment involves setting a kid on fire ... there are too many things that can go wrong,” said a post on the website of the Texas news radio station KTEM.

Some hazards that can be overlooked include additional ingredients present in some sanitizers, such as glycerin and aloe, which stick to the skin and make the fuel mixture burn hotter and longer, similar to napalm. Also, student (or teacher) behavior cannot always be predicted, which creates additional risks.

If the purpose was simply to show that alcohol burns fast, there are hundreds of safer ways to make that point. The American Chemical Society and other major science and education organizations have collaborated to provide teachers with resources for safer demonstrations and activities in the classroom:

https://institute.acs.org/lab-safety/education-and-training/high-school-labs.html

Additionally, the Laboratory Safety Institute offers scholarships of up to $800 for safety education programs, exclusively for K-12 teachers, as well as presentations on safer science demonstrations for interested teacher groups.

The Repeating Rainbow

In a science class in Ohio in 2006, 15-year-old Calais Weber received third-degree burns on 48% of her body when her teacher attempted a “rainbow experiment,” which uses methanol to light various metallic salts to produce different-colored flames. To prevent similar tragedies in science classrooms, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board released a video about the incident called “After the Rainbow” in 2013. Less than a month after that video was released, 16-year-old Alonzo Yanes received disfiguring burns when a teacher in New York attempted the same experiment.

Is making kids say "wow, cool colors" worth all the risk?

Four years later, when filmmaker Christina Kallas produced “The Rainbow Experiment,” an independent film with events that closely mirrored the New York incident, history couldn’t stop repeating itself. Fewer than four months after the film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, and despite a safety alert sent to all science teachers in the United States from the American Chemical Society, a teacher in Tennessee decided to perform the rainbow demonstration again—with the same lack of safety protocols. This time, 17 students were hurt.

All totaled, 164 teachers and students have been injured in classroom demonstrations using flammable solvents from 1988 to 2018, according to a study published by the American Chemical Society. LSI’s founder, Jim Kaufman, has served as an expert witness in dozens of these cases since 1978.

To keep the cycle from repeating again, the rainbow experiment is now banned in New York and by several school districts nationwide. There are safer alternatives to this demonstration, as outlined in the brochure “ Rainbow Flame Demonstration Guidelines,” available free from the Laboratory Safety Institute.

Update: On May 17, 2022, a student was seriously burned in a science demonstration in Indiana. From initial reports, it seems this was yet another case of the same experiment. The rainbow strikes again.

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Student Burned in High School Science Experiment Says It Was 'Something Out of a Horror Movie'

Alonzo Yanes and his parents sued his teacher and the Dept. of Education, and was award $60 million in July

Nearly six years after a high school chemistry experiment went terribly wrong, one young man is opening up about an explosion that left him with burns on more than 30 percent of his body.

Alonzo Yanes recounted the horrifying experience to Inside Edition in an interview Thursday, saying that he was about two and a half feet from where his teacher was conducting the Rainbow Experiment, which is meant to show how igniting different types of salts produces colorful flames, at Beacon High School in Manhattan, New York, in January 2014.

“I remember feeling this immense heat completely come forward and wrap around my entire body,” Yanes recalled of the classroom disaster, which happened when he was in 10th grade.

When the teacher poured a flammable substance into a bowl of nitrate, the experiment went awry and caused an explosion, engulfing him in flames and landing him in the hospital for five months.

“I remember these flashes of blue and orange just flying toward my face. I remember feeling this burning sensation everywhere around my head,” Yanes said, explaining that he dropped to floor to try to put out the fire. “I was yelling out ‘help, help, somebody help me, please.'”

After several surgeries, Yanes is now doing much better, but told Inside Edition that after the accident, “I kinda looked like something out of a horror movie.”

Yanes and his parents sued his teacher and the New York City Department of Education, and he was awarded $60 million by a jury in July.

Before the jury’s decision, Yanes’ lawyer, Ben Rubinowitz, played a demonstration of the experiment in court and the scorching flames reached 10 feet.

Rubinowitz told Inside Edition that he hopes the lawsuit will bring more safety to classrooms — the outlet reported that Yanes’ chemistry classroom was not equipped with safety equipment like vests, fire blankets or a shower.

“If the teacher is going to undertake a demonstration like this, you have got to take precautions, you have got to take safety measures,” Rubinowitz said.

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More than 160 students, teachers nationwide hurt in science experiments gone wrong

by JOCE STERMAN, ALEX BRAUER and ANDREA NEJMAN, Sinclair Broadcast Group

WASHINGTON (SBG) — As many students return to in-person learning, experts are warning about a danger they could face in the classroom: not COVID-19 , but a phenomenon known as flame jetting. It's already injured dozens of students and teachers across the nation in classroom science experiments gone terribly wrong.

Spotlight on America got a firsthand look at the phenomenon known as flame jetting from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives , going behind the scenes at the agency's Fire Research Laboratory in Maryland. As trained and equipped representatives from the ATF demonstrated, the phenomenon can turn a flammable liquid inside a container into a flame thrower, creating a wall of fire that shoots forward with an intense force, torching anything in its path.

According to Jonathan Butta with the ATF, it can happen when alcohols, especially methanol, are used in demonstrations involving an open flame. While the idea is to liven up classroom experiments and give a real-life application to a chemical concept, the results can be tragic. Butta explained, "It essentially turns a typical flammable liquid container into a flamethrower."

"We actually see the flame front propagate up the stream of flammable liquid into that container and expand those vapors and shoot those liquid droplets out with it," said Jonathan Butta with the ATF.

Dozens of students across the country have actually seen flame jetting in action, with tragic consequences. W.T. Woodson High School in Virginia is just one example.

In 2015, a demonstration known as the "Rainbow Experiment" designed to show how burning different salts results in different colors, went wrong at the school. Experts say flame jetting occurred during the experiment, with the tragic outcome detailed in stunning photos . The incident left a classroom at Woodson High School charred and five students injured, including two who had to be airlifted to the hospital with serious burns. Just weeks after the incident, Nick Dache exclusively told our affiliate WJLA , "I think the whole thing was just a freak accident."

Dache actually stepped in to assist one of the students who was burned during the incident. As the young woman ran out of the classroom still on fire, Dache explained he chased her down and used his hands to scuff out the flames on her shirt.

"It almost looked like a blanket. Someone else described it as a fireball," student Nick Dache said of the aftermath of the Rainbow Experiment gone wrong in 2015. "I don't think that's completely accurate because that seems more violent. It got very widespread but it didn't seem super concentrated."

A similar flame jetting incident happened in Ohio in 2006, when student Calais Weber Biery was burned over 40 percent of her body during an experiment in her school's chemistry lab. She's featured in a 2013 Youtube video produced by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board called "After the Rainbow." The video, the organization said, was created in an effort to help prevent classroom accidents in chemistry labs.

"I remember thinking, 'I'm on fire, oh my gosh, I'm on fire,'" student Calais Weber Biery recalled in a Youtube video about the dangers of the Rainbow Experiment. "It's tragic and it shouldn't happen."

Spotlight on America has learned those two incidents are far from isolated. A 2018 study published in the Journal of Chemical Education , an arm of the American Chemical Society , found 164 children and teachers have been injured in classroom demonstrations using flammable solvents since 1988. Additionally, we discovered at least three additional incidents last year alone. Experiments where students and teachers have been injured have happened in the following states:

• North Carolina
• Pennsylvania

The real number of classroom accidents could actually be much higher because Spotlight on America has learned there's no requirement to report accidents to the US Chemical Safety Board , which along with the ACS, has done tremendous outreach, trying to improve experiment safety. In 2015, Kristen Kulinowski, a former member of the USCSB, talked with our affiliate WJLA about the number of accidents in classroom labs, calling them a significant problem. She said, "All of these incidents could have been prevented."

Courts in at least four states including Georgia, Florida, New York and Ohio have agreed, handing over millions in cases filed by students injured in fiery classroom experiments. In one of those cases , nearly $60 million was awarded to a high school student in New York who was badly burned and left with permanent scarring on much of his body as a result of an experiment gone wrong. The award was appealed but just this summer a judge upheld the jury's decision.

For years, some safety advocates have called for banning experiments involving flammable solvents and open flames altogether, while others have lobbied for mandating specific safety protocols to protect students in the classroom. For its part, the ACS has dedicated an entire section of its website to provide resources for educators on how to safely conduct demonstrations and experiments in the classroom. Their efforts even include showing teachers a safe, alternative way to conduct the Rainbow Experiment without putting students at risk.

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2 Marietta students hospitalized with burns after accident in science lab

MARIETTA, Ga. — Two high school students were sent to the hospital after suffering chemical burns earlier this week, according to officials.

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According to Marietta City Schools, the incident happened on Thursday at Marietta High School.

Channel 2′s Cobb County Bureau Chief Michele Newell was at the high school Friday, where Principal Dr. Marvin Crumbs said the two students were in a chemistry lab when they received chemical burns in a letter sent to parents.

“In order to treat those students, the school was immediately put on hold, and students remained in their classrooms,” Crumbs wrote.

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Crumbs states at no point was there a safety risk to other students in the classroom or school.

Crumbs said the accident happened during an advanced science class. It’s still unclear what went wrong, but school officials are meeting with their science team to review everything.

The Chief Operations Officer at Marietta City Schools, Chuck Gardner, said the accident happened during a routine experiment.

“It contained, I think, sulfuric acid and magnesium,” Gardner said. “There was some splatter that happened as a result of the reaction happening a little quicker than the student expected it to.”

The chemicals splashed on two female upperclassmen students whose identities weren’t released.

They were immediately rushed into an emergency shower inside the classroom.

“They ran continuous water for 30 minutes to take care of the students,” Gardner said.

Medics helped each student into an ambulance and they were taken to the hospital.

“We’re hoping they’ll be back at school hopefully next week,” Garnder said.

Gardner said protective gear played a vital role in keeping the injuries from being worse.

“They were wearing the safety goggles the aprons, doing all the things they are supposed to do,” Gardner said. “That always helps limit the injuries.”

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