Researcher severely injured in 2016 Hawaii lab explosion receives £5 million settlement

A researcher who lost an arm when her laboratory experiment exploded in March 2016, has reached a settlement of £5 million with the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, more than eight years after filing the lawsuit.

Thea Ekins-Coward, who was 29 years old at the time, was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa and was carrying out a common procedure, which involved transferring hydrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide gases into a small, low-pressure cylinder to make a growth medium for cells, when the incident occurred.