The Real Danger in College: Campus Safety in the Laboratory

Ryan Kerns

Campus safety is something that concerns many people when deciding where to go to college especially when crimes are so rampant in a place like Georgia Tech. However, are crimes what campus safety is all about? What about safety in the actual school? More specifically, what about the safety in laboratories? What many people don’t realize is that college research laboratories account for hundreds of accidents over the course of a school year. For example, there was a chemical spill just last week here at Georgia Tech that resulted in three students going to Grady Memorial Hospital according to Kristi E. Swartz and Marcus K. Garner in their article for the AJC. This is just one of many similar accidents that happen year round all over the country. For example, in a study by Margaret A. Hellmann, Eldon P. Savage, and Thornas J. Keefe called Safety in the Chemical Laboratory, they claim that out of just 13 higher education institutions in Colorado alone, there was an astounding 574 reported accidents in chemical laboratories in only a twenty year span. If you carry over these numbers to the thousands of colleges across the United States that have research laboratories, it ends up being thousands of accidents that occur annually. This number is way too high considering the countless safety precautions that are in place in many institutions today. This is due, in part, to the ever increasing research that is being done to help advance our understanding of the world around us. Unfortunately, this usually creates the need for more and more dangerous experiments that need to be carried out. However, with the need for more dangerous experiments comes the need for more rigorous safety precautions that keeps students out of the hospital. What exactly can be done to help reduce this rapidly increasing number of accidents?