Following Bioassay Test with seed to expose toxicity from Water sample and DIY spectrometry on a tap water sample
Last night, 4 of us took advantage of the weather conditions to train on :
- Coordinating as a team
- Working in hazardous terrain conditions without Internet access
- Infrared spectrometry
- Bioassays with seeds in water samples
- Testing our procedures and equipment against risks
Near Rennes in Brittany, the weather conditions were such that rain was a factor:
- 18:00: 9.8 mm/1h with an intensity rate at 39.2mm/h
- 19:00: 15.2 mm/1h with intensity rate at 64.4mm/h
- 20:00 1.8 mm/1h with intensity rate at 8mm/h
we sampled :
- Rainwater that ‘falls from the sky’
- Run-off water from roofs
- Water dripping from asphalt in the car park
- Water from ‘raindrops’ under a nearby ash tree
Each person had a clearly defined role:
- 1 for general coordination and collective safety
- 1 for sampling
- 1 for spectrometry
- 1 for bioassays
It took us 3 and a half hours to do everything, from taking the samples with spectro analyses launched less than 5 minutes after sampling to launching 1 series of bioassays with 12 containers of scaled concentrations.
Here are some of the things we learned from this session
Teaming up and Safety First!
Investigation is collaboration!
Here, in the case of our exercise, it is clear that it would have been very difficult, if not impossible - particularly with the level of safety and reliability of the procedures - for a single person to carry out all the work.
While a team here made up of 4 people who know each other, people with experience and knowledge and savvy, may be a ‘comfort’ to work with, it doesn’t prevent issues of safety and security from arising.
- The overconfidence associated with this ‘comfortable’ situation encourages a reduction in individual vigilance.
- The process of ‘doing an exercise’ is ‘played’ as a game by the participants
- On the other hand, it’s also ‘’doing yourself good‘’ not to be in high-intensity/stress/serious conditions all the time.
- Our acquired habits and our overconfidence as a team made us forget the need to implement a recipe for preparing and running such a training session.
- This is a major flaw in the method - transparency, reproduction, repeatability, sharing and criticism.
- This is a major gap in the willingness to share between communities.
Our ‘little worker bees in the rain’ behaviour and our well-tuned coordination attract the attention of other people living in the area or passing by.
Intense rain at night creates a special atmosphere
- Some people like this atmosphere
- Others feel anxious and are more inclined to suspect ‘strange’ behaviour.
We had downplayed the need for mediation/public relations as a dedicated role for one person in our team.
Racism is present and the political context in France opens the floodgates to it. The BIPOC people in the team were the victims of racist remarks during the exercise and one neighbour even called the police without informing us.
All of this, plus a fatigue factor for one of the team members due to her personal life, resulted in a minor injury with a broken Becher during handling in the rain and on slippery ground.
And because ‘we were feeling too confident in a game that was easy for us’, we had forgotten the basic first-aid kit. Safety and Security First! is a day to day practice
InfraRed Spectro Issues
3D Printable Fiber Spectrometer Kit is easy to transport but absolutely fragile, and as it needs computer to work it’s only manageable in a dry safe place.
We are working on a mobile workstation to mitigate this issue.
To work without a network connection and without Internet, we used this downloaded locally and activated in the web browser 3DFiberSpectrograph.
Infrared spectrometry and spectrography require great care and precision.
Although trained as a team, it’s always difficult in “outdoor terrain with difficult weather” conditions.
What’s more, as the software is supplied in its “test” state, the task of qualibration is all the more meticulous and error-prone.
Last but not least, the software uses an experimental JS (in 3DFiberSpectrograph/assets/js/capture.js line 579) feature not supported by Firefox and many other browsers window.showSaveFilePicker, see technical details here. Once again, this makes it far too difficult to export data for post-processing and interpretation of the spectrometry performed.
Outdoor field work is not office chair work 