Not an engineering story but along a similar vein.
When I was at University I dated an older girl who was doing a PhD in chemistry. the grads had an office that was shared about 1 between ten people. Each office had a lab next to it. I made friends with the group of grads in that lab, and did a lot of my work in there, as it was far warmer than my room. In the course of a few months, I saw a number of interesting events:
My friend Stuart was working with Hydrofluric acid, which is by far the most dangerous acid you can get. If some lands on you, it will immediately eat through your skin and destroy the nerve endings, so it is painless. It will then proceed to eat the calcium in any bones it can get to. There are horror stories of people waking in the morning to find no bones left in their hand or arm, and sadly these are true. Anyway, stuart managed to drop some on himself in a fairly spectacular way, getting spatters of it all over his body. At the time he was wearing a fairly brightly coloured track suit. The acid immediately ate through this, hit his skin, eat through that and then proceeded to attack the bone.
Stuart starts shouting, tearing off his clothes. We all come running into the lab to find a long haired loon with neat holes all over his naked body. We managed to get him to A+E, where he was shot full of HF antidote, as it's very poisonous, and was given treatment to stop the acid attacking his bones.
When all the holes had healed, it turned out that HF did not destroy the dye in his track suit. He therefore has bright red and green "tattoo's" over his entire body, and will do forever more...
Second "interesting" event happened when a crazy hungarian girl was working in the lab trying to remove all the water content from petrol as part of an experiment. To do this, you add powdered sodium to the petrol, and then boil it. So, away Marta is going, but she left the top off the bottle of powdered sodium, and was working right next to a pool of water. Some how, she managed to give the sodium a damn good whack, which knocked it into the pool of water. This then detonated, causing the boiling petrol to detonate immediately afterward.
So, she is now covered in burning, boiling petrol. The lab is decked out with fire extinguishers, so me and my friend Chris immediately grab them and run towards her. However, in her panic, she runs away from us, out into a corridor, setting fire in the process to a number of notices on the wall, and then outside.
So we have myself and my friend chris running after a screaming, burning lunatic hungarian who won't let us her her to put her out. After probably a minute or so, chris was forced to drop his extinuisher and rugby tackle her to the floor, so that I could put her out.
Somehow, she managed to get away with only very mild burns.
Last incident involved Victor, the proffesor of my girlfriend. Some how, victor managed to get hold of a 3kg solid block of pure magnesiun. Victor was a pretty odd person. He was a chemsitry genius, but a russian loon as well, and did all sorts of strange experiemts, including such oddities as having some of his students buy what ever erm... chemical stimulants.. they could, using lab funds, at the student bar, so that he could analyise the content of the drugs during lunch times.
Anywho, victor decided it would be fun to light the magnisium block, as magnusium burns very fiercely. He tried lighting it in a fume cupboard with a bunsen burner, and then using various chemical reactions that generated a lot of heat. This didn't work, so he picked up the block and carried it to the tea room, where upon he put it on the stove and lit all the hobs.
It was only when another professor came into the room saw what he was doing and started shouting that he stopped. The worst thing was that Victors enthusiasm was so infectious that a big group of us were clustered around the stove waiting to see what would happen, and up to that point it had seemed a perfectly sensible thing to do!
Steve