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March 04 School fire and beyond...It was a reality check for all of us here today! All those mock fire drills, alarm codes and fire safety instructions were tested and put into effect. There was a fire in one of our transformers and all power supply to the school is out! There was thick black smoke all over and some twenty fire trucks in action... This is another pain of living in a zone surrounded by NYPD and nearly 10 hospitals. We all heard the sirens and promptly disregarded them as we hear them all the time... So, why panic??? Somone is always in emergency! Only this time, we really were in one! Realization that something was indeed wrong dawned only when the number of trucks kept rising and finally, we saw smoke! Panic took over when we realized that all the invaluble cell lines and glycerol stocks in the -80 freezers were going to be lost irreversibly... But when no one, and I mean no one, was allowed inside, all we could do was stand outside in the frigid air and wait... The colder it got, the more chatty we all became and I must admit, I listened to some very meaningful conversations in those few hours... Although most labs tend to share one common room for the -80s and that room is indeed on emergency supply, what about the -20s??? Isn't some really precious stuff stored in there too- like restriction enzymes, enzyme kits etc. These are very sensitive to freeze-thaw and so, isn't it a safer idea to apply the rule of -80s to the -20s too? Wouldn't it have saved a lot of worry and anxiety on the part of the whole school community if the -20s were also in one common place hooked up to emergency??? We could enter the building only close to midnight to salvage whatever we could from the freezers... Luckily for us, the emergency supply had kicked in around 7pm and the -80s were safe... However, only some of the -20s were on emergency... Atleast in our lab, close to five boxes of enzymes were/ could be affected! We managed to move stuff around and pool them all into fridges which are now crammed.... And the school's as cold as the outside air as there's no heating! Also, has made me think how much we could not do without electricity.... I can set up a restriction digestion (if the enzymes are still good!), but there's no 37degree water bath to incubate it. I can pellet cells but can't vortex it. I can't even cast a simple agarose gel!!!!!!! I can't do nothing............As you can see, life here has come to a standstill! And looks like it will continue to stand still for a couple of more days....I guess this is a good excuse for me to sit at home and work on my Qual!!! TrackbacksThe trackback URL for this entry is: http://dramalinny.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!516FEF8BC78EA8B0!172.trak Weblogs that reference this entry
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