Fire causes little permanent damage
A base chemical bath caused a fire in the organic chemistry laboratory on the third floor of George R. Brown Hall Aug. 24. The fire started when the postdoctorate associate working in the lab left the room. There were no injuries.
Rice University Police Chief Bill Taylor said a smoke alarm detected the fire at 3:48 p.m., which alerted the Rice University Police Department dispatcher to call the fire department. When RUPD arrived, people had begun to evacuate the building. Taylor said the fire was put out within minutes after firemen arrived.
“There was no secondary fire,” Taylor said. “The one fire that was there was put out very rapidly.”
Director of Environmental Health and Safety Kathryn Cavender said the fire was contained to one side of the lab.
Water used to put out the fire caused most of the damage to the building, including carpet damage to the second and third floors, Cavender said.
“There was some soot that was cleaned up from the hallways when they came in and wiped down the halls,” she said. “All the fire damage was isolated to one bench in the lab.”
Cavender said the fire department broke a window in the lab to ventilate the area. She said ceiling tiles, a cabinet and a lab bench need replacement.
Risk Manager Renee Block said monetary damage assessments of the building are not complete.
“What we need to do is get a contractor in there, [and then] we’ll be able to put together a scope of work on what needs to be replaced,” Block said. “After we have that scope of work, that will provide us with an indication of what the estimated damage will be.”
Cavender said determining preventative measures for the future is difficult because she does not know why the fire started.
“The problem is [in not] having a cause,” she said. “It’s hard to change a procedure because we don’t know what went wrong.”
Cavender said Blackman Mooring Steamatic Catastrophes, Inc., the company hired to clean up the fire damage, finished by 8:00 p.m. the day of the fire. Rice hired another company, Seafour Environmental, to handle the chemical damage.
“Now we’re just waiting for [Rice] to hire a contractor to finish removing the cabinets from the lab,” Cavender said. “Then we’ll rebuild it.”
Chemistry Professor Ed Billups, who runs the lab, said the fire destroyed all the instruments and reagents nearby.
“We lost chemicals and time,” Billups said. “We recovered all of the information from the computers that were there, so in that sense, we didn’t lose any work.”
Billups, whose research involves nanotechnology and organic chemistry, said his students will work in other labs until the damage is repaired.
Taylor said the situation was handled smoothly.
“It was pretty straightforward,” Taylor said. “There was a fire, it was put out, and then it was over. It always takes longer to clean up than it takes for it to burn.”
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