Are You Prepared for the ‘Worst Case Scenario’?
by
If forced to find a silver lining in disasters, they often serve as a catalyst for those who were unaffected to take stock of their own worst-case scenario preparedness. As scientists, we have at least two worlds to worry about – our homes and our labs. Of course, for grad students the line between the two is blurry… Labs hold tens of thousands of unique reagents generated over decades of research that, unlike many workplace environments, can’t be reordered with an insurance claim check.
So although we’ve discussed ways to disaster-proof your bench, many of us roll the dice thinking it will never happen to us. But what if it did – exactly how bad would it be? If you walked into lab tomorrow and it turned out there was no lab, would you simply walk down the hall, grab your backup materials and get started in another lab? Or would the response likely include tears, a stiff drink and years of rebuilding reagents?
.
[poll id=”85″]
.
.
Have any tips for preparing for the lab’s worst case scenarios?
.
.
Bonnie
wrote on August 29, 2011 at 1:07 pm
I voted "up the creek", even though I probably have a better disaster plan than 90% of researchers. I just don't think it's possible to plan to salvage all/most of a wet lab's supplies in the event of a major flood and months-long power outage. After a major disaster, expect to replace every chemical all the way down to the sodium chloride.
I was in a lab that was closed down for several months after Katrina, so here are a couple of tips for things to do before evacuating:
1) When evacuating, consider bringing along expensive/homemade things that can be stored at room temperature or -20. Take aliquots of plasmids, antibodies, and bacterial strains, and store them in a freezer wherever you evacuate. Anything that requires -80 or LN2 storage is probably going to be lost unless the university has a good plan in place for maintaining emergency power. It may be completely impossible to get LN2 delivered for weeks due to impassable streets. Consider banking irreplaceable cell lines somewhere off-site as part of your disaster preparedness strategy (such as a satellite campus of your university or ATCC's safe depository program).
2) Turn off and unplug equipment before leaving, of course. But also: consider wrapping smaller equipment such as microscopes in sealed plastic trash bags. A months-long power outage will lead to a buildup of humidity even if the building doesn't flood, and the humidity can corrode electronics and put icky films on the insides of microscope lenses. Also drain water out of any equipment with a water tank, such as autoclaves or incubators. Algae in stagnant water can clog tubing and get pretty gross.
3) Remember that once you've done all you can, all you can do is shrug it off, come back home whenever the power's back on, and try to put things back together to the best of your ability. Whatever the disaster is, someone somewhere has recovered from worse.
alan@benchfly
wrote on August 29, 2011 at 5:14 pm
Fantastic advice! The steps in #2 are easy yet so often overlooked and could save thousands of dollars that would otherwise go towards restoring/replacing damaged equipment. That money could instead be spent on a lab "We Prepared Well!" party…
@FLOSciences
wrote on August 29, 2011 at 2:38 pm
Our lab is on the 4th floor so flooding isn't an issue- but a leaky roof is. We've become accustomed to covering anything expensive with plastic bags. We also had our -80 freezer fail recently so we have it on emergency power and a backup -80C running elsewhere in the complex.
I'm not really worried about reagents so much as cell lines, plasmids, oligos, etc. While we have generators, backup freezers, etc, what happens if "the worst" really happens: the whole complex gets leveled. I feel like having an arrangement with a researcher nearby is a good idea. Store aliquots of their important stuff and vice versa. I hadn't thought about ATCC but that's good too.
What, though, about data? We have off site redundant data storage but what about your lab notebooks? THAT could be an issue and might be a good case for scanning or otherwise duplicating the writing in your notebooks. While my data is safe, most of what I have in my notebook is there, and there only!
alan@benchfly
wrote on August 29, 2011 at 5:19 pm
I always used to "backup" my hard copy notebook by making copies of important experiments. That may seem like a lot of work, but when you think about how many experiments either don't work or are derivatives of a previous entry, there aren't too many "big" experiments left. And for most of them, the data analysis was performed on a computer, so the data can be backed up off-site and won't be lost.
gabo
wrote on August 29, 2011 at 5:49 pm
Down here (Chile) we've got lots of earthquakes so a simple measure we took just before the 8.8 earthquake on feb 2010 was to put some metal rails in the shelves of the bench and in the storage area, so the bottles and reagents didn't fall down. Some labs have a diesel-powered electric generator, but that's not insurance: in another lab, the generator couldn't go on-line, so the freezers failed. It's a good idea to have back up samples in other places. I'd also suggets to bolt to the bench some pieces of expensive, bigger equipment (In Talca, lots of equipment broke down when they felt from the bench)
alan@benchfly
wrote on August 29, 2011 at 9:51 pm
Adding railings and bolting down equipment is a great idea especially in earthquake-prone locations. Just be sure to keep a close eye on your PI as they'll be tempted to bolt grad students to the bench too…
drmmobs
wrote on September 5, 2011 at 5:21 am
We have electronic lab notebooks now, so data are not even stored onsite but 25km away on the university main campus (and it is backed up to another suburban site). We can access it from anywhere (even overseas). All data is uploaded as soon as it is generated. Of course, it's still up to the researchers to add all their personal notes…
Our labs are on top of a hill (not much chance of a flood) and there are back up generators on all the freezers and tissue processors. Cells are in vapor phase liquid nitrogen – piped from a tank in the basement and also on a back up generator.
Our main problem would be the dozens of genetically modified mouse lines we have breeding. It would take at least a year to get them breeding again…