A university investigation of the Sept. 18 fire in the Chemistry Building has yielded ideas on how to prevent costly fires in the future.

Wes Arvin, the UC Davis fire department assistant chief, and Andrew Majewski, a health safety manager for Environmental Health and Safety, joined together in writing the report, "Analysis of Laboratory Fire in Room 130 Chemistry Building."

Arvin said the fire caused no injuries but quickly produced about $610,000 in damage. As the report notes, the blaze started when fire ignited a fume hood and its contents.

"The cause of the fire was a failure of glass tubing in a condenser resulting in water coming in contact with a water-reactive metal catalyst," Arvin said.

The fire spread and filled the room with smoke and also caused a leak in one of the lab's water lines, making water gather on the floor and in the nearby hallway.

Arvin said minor smoke damage occurred to the adjacent laboratory, room 123, as well as laboratories directly above the fire on the second floor -- room 227 -- and third floor rooms 327 and 331.

Room 130, which is chemistry professor Phil Power's laboratory, is expected to reopen in four to five months, according to Arvin. A major clean-up is now under way.

Small but powerful

Arvin said the physical size of the fire was quite small--an estimated nine feet wide and four feet high. Yet it caused significant damage because of where it was situated in a room of sophisticated equipment. On top of this, the smoke and soot damage was extensive, the assistant fire chief noted.

"Most, if not all, the equipment in the room was destroyed," said Arvin. Fortunately, campus firefighters responded within three minutes to 911 calls on the fire, he said. "That absolutely helped prevent it from spreading any farther."

For Power, the fire came as a shock. His reaction upon learning of it was to wonder whether anybody was hurt. "And no one was, thankfully," he said.

Power and his students are restarting their projects now that the lab has been cleared out. The department relocated the professor's lab to another room while room 130 is being remodeled. "Some chemicals that the students had made were lost," he said. "So that did set us back."

Safety measures offered

The five-page report included measures that could help prevent future fires or mitigate damages in the event of a fire in lab buildings or elsewhere on campus. Those measures include:

• Replacing hot-distillation equipment to purify solvents with a Grubbs apparatus. A fire associated with the hot-still equipment at UC Irvine in 2001 resulted in the UC system switching over to the Grubbs equipment.

Ironically, Arvin said, the hot-still equipment that caused the fire was due to be replaced soon with safer equipment consistent with those UC guidelines. He noted that those efforts were under way in the chemistry department.

"Not only was the chemistry department, led by professor Philip Jessop, instrumental in the development of the guidelines, but it also has been proactive in securing funds to convert to the new Grubbs apparatus, which is a much safer process," said Arvin.

• Shutting off all utilities at the lab supply valve prior to a utility shutdown. This includes all electricity, water, gas, compressed air and vacuum utilities. The report advises manually opening supply valves or plug-in equipment after the utility has been restored and verifying the proper operation of the equipment.
• Keeping hallways and exits clear. Materials stored in halls or exit paths make it difficult for people exiting a burning building and hinder firefighters in extinguishing the fire. The report cited the presence of several crates and other office equipment in the corridor just north of room 130.
• Properly sealing fire rated walls and shafts. Smoke, hot gases and soot from room 130 seeped into other rooms as a result of pipes, ducts and door assemblies that did not have proper sealing. The report suggests the university examine seal penetrations in the Chemistry Building fire walls and the rest of campus.
• Retrofitting the Chemistry Building with fire sprinklers. The Chemistry Buil-ding is an older building that does not have fire sprinklers. Still, the investigators noted that UC Santa Cruz installed fire sprinklers in one of its older lab buildings, Sinsheimer Hall, after a recent multi-million dollar laboratory fire in that building.

"Retrofitting the building with fire sprinklers not only makes good economic sense," the repot stated, "but also affords the occupants a higher degree of life-safety protection."

Other suggestions include inspecting fume hoods throughout campus; considering an on-call system for Environmental Health and Safety staff; addressing air-balance problems in the Chemistry Building; and replacing doors with new ones that do not permit those doors to be left open, which results in smoke leakage.

Arvin said that the investigation was begun Sept. 20, the Monday following the fire. David Stiles and T.C. Smith from the campus fire department took part in the investigation along with Arvin and Majewski. Ken Davidson, an arson and bomb investigator with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also lent his assistance.

Arvin noted that Powers and chemistry department chair William Jackson provided "excellent assistance" throughout the investigation.