Los Alamos Lab

[maury <maury@webtexas.com>]

      Monday, July 19, 2004



      Headline News

Safety incidents contributed to order to stand down

 ROGER SNODGRASS, roger@lamonitor.com,

 Monitor Assistant Editor



On top of multiple security lapses at Los Alamos

National Laboratory, a number of safety breaches

have also troubled the Director G. Peter Nanos

during the last year. An accident, Wednesday

afternoon, struck a 20-year-old student intern,

working at the chemical diagnostic and

instrumentation group.



The incident was not the direct cause of the total

stand down at the lab, but a lab official said, "It

would be equally wrong to say it did not have a

contributing impact."  According to LANL Public

Affairs Director Jim Fallin, the young woman

was working with her supervisor on a series of

experiments using a Class IV pulsed laser when she

experienced an eye problem. Shortly afterward, as

her vision grew blurred she was taken to the lab's

Occupational Medical Facility, where a physician

said he suspected that she had a detached or

damaged retina.



Referred to an eye specialist outside the laboratory,

she was told that the injury was a ruptured blood

vessel, damage that might be explained by a laser

accident.



Referred to a second specialist in Santa Fe,

the next day, the diagnosis was that

her retina was injured.



Fallin said the laboratory has arranged for

the student's parents to be flown to New

Mexico and for the student to be treated by

a renowned eye specialist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Other safety events that took place over the last year included

an accident involving an unseated syringe

that sprayed into a worker's eye and a "near miss" involving a

demolition crew and an

electrical transformer that could have

caused an electrocution or a fatal explosion.









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