Chemical Explosion at UMD, Campus Buildings Now Safe to Enter
DULUTH, Minn. — A chemical explosion caused multiple buildings to evacuate Thursday morning at UMD. This left one person injured.
The report of the explosion came in at 9:20 a.m. from a basement lab of Voss Kovach Hall. Authorities say the injured person is a graduate student who was working in the lab at the time. They have now been released from the hospital. One other student was an in adjacent lab and was assessed with no injuries.
UMD-PD arrived on scene with the help of the Duluth Fire Department, and Mayo Ambulance Service. It was determined there was no real fire danger. So, HAZMAT took over to assess what chemicals were involved.
“We know that the chemical is nitric acid. We don’t know what caused the reaction. There will be an investigation that will follow up and that will start immediately as the fire department clears the building and allows us back in there. We will start, we will write reports, we will involve research safety. We will involve our parent department down in the Twin Cities to help us with the investigation. And we will find out what caused this and work at ways at preventing this in the future,” said Andy Kimball, Department of Environmental Health & Safety, UMD.
As for the buildings needing to evacuate. The explosion was contained to a small area of a lab but buildings at UMD are interconnected.
“All of our buildings are interconnected in with our ventilation system. Once we received information from Duluth Fire that this could also potentially affect in minimal ways other buildings on campus. We immediately notified using our SAFE-U system to campus letting them know what is happening, to evacuate Voss Kovach Hall and some of the other surrounding buildings that would be affected,” said Police Chief Sean Huls, UMD Police Department.
UMD sent out an update just before 4 p.m. Thursday saying that an all clear has been sent to campus. The building evacuations are lifted, and all campus buildings are open and safe to enter.
