Abstract: At 5:45 p.m. on October 19, 1995, Employee #1 was cleaning up his lab at a research institute when he noticed that a round-bottomed flask on his lab bench was missing a stopper. When he picked up the flask to put in a new stopper, the flask exploded. His left middle, ring, and little fingers were amputated and he sustained numerous lacerations on his left arm, neck, and torso. The flask contained 10 g of a material that he had synthesized three weeks earlier. The material was a preceramic polymeric precursor to silicon nitride. No previous research had indicated that a preceramic polymer of this type could explode.