DENVER – A Denver high school teacher learned a harsh lesson about what not to bring into a classroom full of students.

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The Safety Zone reports that Science, Math and Arts Academy teacher Daniel Powell was teaching his class about the burning properties of methanol. (Just what every high school student needs to know.) But the demonstration went awry when Powell, not happy that the flame was not high enough, added more methanol from a 4-liter container.

The fire flashed back into the container then became a virtual flame thrower that shot out of the bottle and struck a student wearing a synthetic shirt sitting 15 feet away causing serious injury. The student has been hospitalized. Others sitting nearby were also injured. They were treated and released. Powell was also injured, but he refused treatment. He has been put on paid administrative leave.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board was called in. Investigator Mark Wingard said Powell had no special training in the dangers of methanol before conducting the demonstration. Methanol is also known as methyl alcohol, wood alcohol, wood naphtha or wood spirits.

Chemical Safety Board Managing Director Daniel Horowitz said, “Instructors and teachers are just not aware of the flashback hazard of methanol. [It] has a flash point that’s pretty similar to gasoline. I think that if people knew that gallon containers of gasoline were being brought into classrooms right near flames, they would be horrified.”

Powell is not alone in his misuse of methanol. Apparently, ignorance of methanol’s properties is fairly common among classroom teachers. Wingard said the board knows of 11 incidents since 2000 in which methanol resulted in fires during science demonstrations.

On September 9, 2013 in Frisco Texas, two middle school students and a teacher were injured in a flash fire.

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On October 3, 2013 in Douglas County, Georgia, one student suffered burns on 25 percent of her body when methanol unexpectedly dispensed from a container and ignited, setting her on fire.

On November 12, 2013 in Avondale, Arizona, four students and a teacher were injured by a ‘flash explosion’ of methanol.

On November 25, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois, a high school student suffered second degree burns on her hands and four other students were hospitalized when the teacher doing the experiment poured an unmeasured amount of methanol on an experiment involving cobalt and a match.

This past January in New York City, two students were burned when their teacher added methanol to a flame test experiment that she thought had died out.

Just this month in Reno, Nevada, nine people, eight of them children, were sent to a hospital after another methanol experiment went bad at the Terry Lee Wells Discovery Museum.

You’d think the education community or a government safety board would be alerting schools about this problem. Even Horowitz stopped short of advocating an outright ban on methanol in the classroom. Apparently he believes the problem is not the methanol itself but the amount that is being used. He suggests pouring out only the amount that is necessary for the experiment and keeping the 4-liter containers far away from the experiment.

Still one has to ask, are these experiments really necessary?