Posted on 05/02/2013 9:48:34 AM PDT by Zakeet
Science experiments don't always go the way they are intended. This, a 16-year-old Florida teenager knows all too well.
This week, Kiera Wilmot went to school and mixed some household chemicals in a tiny 8-ounce water bottle. It looked like a simple chemistry project but then the top popped off when a small explosion occurred.
Wilmot, who is in good standing as a student, said it was an accident. The Bartow High School principal told a local television station that the teen made a “bad choice” and called her a a good kid who has never previously been in trouble.
“Honestly, I don't think she meant to ever hurt anyone,” Principal Ron Pritchard told a Tampa Bay television station. “She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did. Her mother is shocked too.”
In another era, Wilmot may have gotten scolded and sent back to class. But in this age of zero-tolerance policies, Wilmot is in deep trouble. She was arrested on Monday morning after the incident and charged with possession and discharge of a weapon on school property and discharging a destructive device.
In turn, she was expelled and will finish her high school years in an expulsion program.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I remember illuminating the entire central quadrangle with a powdered aluminum “volcano”.
It had a nasty habit of occasionally launching them the wrong direction.
I read that she did this outside in the school yard away from students, but she didn’t tell her teachers about it. It was unsupervised. She thought mixing bathroom cleaner and aluminum foil would cause some smoking, but not an explosion. I bet the felony charges are dropped.
Ah, so she made a drano bomb. Those can actually be kind of dangerous.
If it’s true, as someone else posted, that she used toilet bowl cleaner and balls of aluminum foil, then it is no accident. That is a well-known recipe for a crude homemade bomb, available all over the internet. Nobody accidentally combines those two things on a lark.
“She thought mixing bathroom cleaner and aluminum foil would cause some smoking, but not an explosion.”
BS. She got the recipe from the Anarchist’s Cookbook, or one of the other bomb making manuals floating around online, and she knew exactly what she was trying to do.
No, mixing toilet bowl cleaner (it has to be a specific brand, I won’t say which) and aluminum results in very rapid release of gasses, but not toxic ones. The dangerous part is that, if you do this in a container that is closed tightly, the gas has no way to escape except to explode the container. Since the toilet bowl cleaner also contains a solution of acid, that explosion would spray somewhat corrosive chemicals as well.
So, the fact that she knew the right brand of cleaner, used the foil in rolled up balls, and did it in a bottle, then put the cap on, means she was following a specific bomb-making recipe. She literally followed step-by-step the instructions in a bomb-making manual.
They ban them because they aren’t science experiments, just demonstrations of already well-known phenomena. If I had made a volcano, even for my 3rd grade science fair, I would have gotten an F because of that reason.
In my day, one had to order from the back pages of the Popular Science magazine to learn such things. NI3 made school most interesting.
The bowl cleanser is typically Sodium Hydroxide. Basic, not Acidic.
It is a hydrogen gas generator.
Possibly. They could be trying to smooth things over.
The teacher is responsible for what is going on in their class, not the students. It is the teacher who should be expelled. My favorite project in chemistry was contact explosives and stink bombs.
Punishing kids for curiosity is stupid. Making supervised children more accountable than the supervising adult is criminal.
Aluminum is the accelerate of choice for many explosive mixtures... Toilet bowel cleaner. IIRC, one more ingredient and she made a small but very real bomb.
From what I’ve read she “experimented” with this on her own. This was in no way a school assignment or even science fair project.
We had one “nerd” in my Middle School that was setting off smoke bombs in empty locker on timers. The third time he got his mixture off and blew six locker to pieces. Had it happened 30 seconds later after the class change bell there would have been several students injured or killed.
That's endothermic.
Reminds me of a line from one of my favorite movies...
A few household chemicals in the proper proportions.
The recipe that I’ve always seen uses the bowl cleaner with HCl, which also reacts with the aluminum to release hydrogen. Maybe it works with different kinds of cleaners, but from my experience, it only ever worked with the HCl cleaners.
Diet Coke & Mentos
I didn’t know that! I had used Sodium Hydroxide and aluminum in the past to generate hydrogen for balloons.
The reaction will release hydrogen gas but unless there is an ignition source there is no "explosion". The gas pressure just pops the cap. Some more destructive kids use a 2 liter bottle and more of the reactants, these can be dangerous as the bottle ruptures quite vigorously. If it was picked up by a bystander thinking it was trash the flying debris could cause eye injuries and/or caustic burns.
Some toilet bowl cleaners contain hydrochloric acid which will react with aluminum as does lye (sodium hydroxide) which is found in drain cleaners like Draino and Red Devil Lye, neither one of which you would want to splash in your face!
What she did was hardly threatening and to charge her with a felony is ridiculous overreaction.
Regards,
GtG
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