“Toxic” Does Not Mean “Time to Panic”
September 21st, 2008
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Imagine the following situation:
You’re a student in high school or junior high when suddenly an announcement comes over the PA system saying that all students must immediately evacuate the school. The announcement states that all classes should avoid the science lab section of the school and take exit routes that won’t take them through that area, using alternate exit routes and moving away from the school building after exiting. Your teacher begins to lead the class to the nearest exit.
As you wait outside, the police and fire department arrive. They rope off the school and stand in front, but do not enter.
Finally a group or emergency response personal slowly open the door and begin to enter, wearing coveralls and respirators as others set up a decontamination shower outside.
A group of students is kept away from everyone else and is hurried onto ambulances to be taken to the hospital for evaluation.
You hear talk of a parents meeting to be held at the auditorium of another local school, to discuss the situation and address the concerns of parents and students. One of the teachers says something about hoping that they will be able to open the school again by the end of the week. The local news arrives to report on the situation.
This is when you find out the cause of this panic: Someone in one of the science classrooms has broken a thermometer and in doing so, they’ve let out a about a drop and a half of mercury metal.
Believe it or not, this situation is not fictional. It’s a generic version of a story that happens all the time. The illustrations seen to the side are all from news accounts of this kind of thing happening: An emergency response to a small mercury spill caused by a broken thermometer, blood pressure monitor, tilt switch or some other kind of mercury containing device. It happens most commonly in schools where mercury thermometers are still commonly used in science classrooms.
Some Recent Examples:
Mercury Spill in Lab Forces Flagler High school Evacuation (USA – Florida)
Mercury Spill Cleaned Up at Law High (USA – Connecticut)
Newington Middle School Evacuated (USA – Connecticut)
Mercury Spill Closes Cranston East (USA – Rhode Island)
Mercury spill Shuts Down Another School (USA – Minnesota)
Queens School Shut Down Over Mercury Spill May Be Able to Reopen Monday (USA – New York)
Cardozo School Evacuated In Spill of Mercury (USA – Washington DC)
Crews Clean Up Mercury Spill at Winchester Doctor’s Office (USA – Kentucky)
Norman Wells Clinic Reopens After Mercury Spill (Canada – North West Territory)
Mercury Spill at Goolwa school (Australia)
Emergency Crews Respond to Mercury Spill At Alberta Middle School (Canada – BC)
Students Screened, Dismissed After Mercury Spill (USA – Ohio)
A bit of an overreaction, perhaps?
Mercury is certainly toxic and it’s definately not something that you want to have a lot of contact with. The vapors are toxic as well and mercury should never be discharged into the enviornment or directly into the sewer.
However, is it really necessary to take steps this dramatic? Probably not. Most instructions for cleaning up small mercury spills recomend closing off the room the spill occured in, but not the building. They also recomend opening exterior windows but closing off any interior doors or vents.
Here’s what the US EPA says should be done to clean up small mercury spills:
Before Clean-up: Air Out the Room
* Have people and pets leave the room, and don’t let anyone walk through the breakage area on their way out.
* Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more.
* Shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system, if you have one.Clean-Up Steps for Hard Surfaces
* Carefully scoop up glass pieces and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.
* Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass fragments and powder.
* Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place towels in the glass jar or plastic bag.
* Do not use a vacuum or broom to clean up the broken bulb on hard surfaces.Clean-up Steps for Carpeting or Rug
* Carefully pick up glass fragments and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.
* Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass fragments and powder.
* If vacuuming is needed after all visible materials are removed, vacuum the area where the bulb was broken.
* Remove the vacuum bag (or empty and wipe the canister), and put the bag or vacuum debris in a sealed plastic bag.Clean-up Steps for Clothing, Bedding and Other Soft Materials
* If clothing or bedding materials come in direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from inside the bulb that may stick to the fabric, the clothing or bedding should be thrown away. Do not wash such clothing or bedding because mercury fragments in the clothing may contaminate the machine and/or pollute sewage.
* You can, however, wash clothing or other materials that have been exposed to the mercury vapor from a broken CFL, such as the clothing you are wearing when you cleaned up the broken CFL, as long as that clothing has not come into direct contact with the materials from the broken bulb.
* If shoes come into direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from the bulb, wipe them off with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place the towels or wipes in a glass jar or plastic bag for disposal.
That’s basically the gist of what most instructions will tell you to do. There are a few other tricks that can be employed. Sulfur powder (sold as ‘flowers of sulfur’ in some drug stores and generally kept in any chemistry lab) can be used to aid in the cleanup. After most of the mercury has been cleaned up, sprinkle some of the sulfur in the area. It will bind any remaining mercury and if there is still mercury resedue present, it will change color from yellow to brown. So if the sulfur stays yellow when spread in the area, you can be reasonably sure you’ve gotten all the mercury up.
The area should be kept unoccupied while it airs out and any cloths that may have come in contact should also be aired out before being washed. Obviously rubber gloves should be worn, and if a lab apron or other protection is avaliable, it would be a good idea to put that on too.
There are also purpose-made mercury spill cleanup kits avaliable which contain everything you’d need for one of these small spills. They include a small dropper or suction bulb, plastic bags, protective gloves and other necessary supplies. They also have instructions in how to respond to the spill.
Anywhere that has a bunch of mercury thermometers or otherwise has the potential for a mercury spill should have one of these kits or at least have the supplies avaliable for it’s cleanup.
Obviously any very large mercury spill will require professional response, but really, do we need to evacuate a whole damn school over a broken thermometer? Why not just evacuate the room involved? And shouldn’t the science teachers of a school know enough about this stuff to realize there’s no need for panic and how to respond?
If people are going to be so absolutely terrified about something like a mercury thermometer and treat it like the material is more toxic than VX nerve gas, then maybe these things shouldn’t be used in schools. There are certainly alternatives, and digital thermometers are easier to read anyway.
I wonder if this is just another sign of our nanny-state in which anything tocxic or believed to be harmful is always treated with a level of fear and panic so great it’s just plain ridiculous.
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 9:46 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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September 21st, 2008 at 9:55 pm
I hear about this stuff all the time. A thermometer breaking? That’s ridiculous but similar things have happened when someone in an office or school or something smells something funny and then all of a sudden people are reporting headaches and it turns out to be nothing at all.
Sometimes I think that these small emergency services and fire departments out somewhere just want the opportunity to use all the stuff they have. They go to hazmat training and get all kinds of special response equipment with homeland security money and they don’t ever get to use it.
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September 21st, 2008 at 10:16 pm
I have seen this sort of over-the-top responses to industrial spills were the volumes did not warrant it, and Gregor’s suspicion is close to the truth: they do turn minor incidences into drills to keep the responders up to scratch. While I can see this in a situation where the hazmat responders are people working in a plant at other jobs, who serve on these teams only as needed, I can’t see why a professional service would need to as they train all the time anyway.
I do agree the sort of overreaction described in the links does cause panic among the ignorant, and some commonsense should be applied in cases like these.
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September 21st, 2008 at 10:24 pm
DV82XL said:
What about just the fact that it closes a school unnecessarily? or not only schools but a clinic because a blood pressure monitor breaks and they only need to close one room? Or even some place else?
Plus the money aspect. Lets say you have something small like this and you end up with a public school closed for a few days and that upsets parents schedules and sets the school year back and it also means thousands spent on cleaning it up when a chem teacher with an eyedropper and some sulfur could take care of it in five minutes?
You realize this situation is getting worse and not better. We’re going to get to the point where someone spills bleach at a laundry mat and the whole town has to be evacuated and government money paid to put people up elsewhere in shelters.
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September 22nd, 2008 at 12:36 am
What do you expect? We’ve taught our kids that everything unnatural or technical or slightly toxic is so dangerous you need to be frightened of it. We’ve gotten to the point were people think that everything they touch will give them cancer or something. Cell phones, wifi, cleaning chemicals, artificial sweetener is all killing us. its an overlitigious society ontop of that too.
People need to realize there’s no black and white for danger. Some things have a sliding scale. Life causes death. You can’t panic over every little thing. If it were a huge mercury spill i’d understand, but sometimes you have to accept that small things happen adn we can deal with it.
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September 22nd, 2008 at 1:17 am
DV82XL said:
I’ve seen a lot of overresponse to situations from the emergency services like volunteer fire departments in smaller towns and communities. I think it’s a use-it-or-loose-it thing and a whole budgetary thing. You know, they get sent to hazmat training or get some equipment on town expense and then when it comes time for a new budget they’d like to tell the committee how ‘we responded to three hazmat situations last year and we also were involved in seven water rescues and four serious vehicle fires”
I mean, it stops them from getting downsized and helps them milk the system. If they get a hazmat van funded and it sits there for five years with nothing happening the town committee might decide that it’s better to sell it and contract to the next town over’s hazmat team for support in the event of an incident.
They sure don’t want that. More calls. More opportunity to use their stuff. More chances to score some points get on TV, justify their spending money on training/equipment/personnel that otherwise might be questioned as not being necessary. Also gives them a chance to try to get some more stuff and avoid layoffs.
Nothing against the fire department, you understand, or any emergency services, but they often do face budget crunches and this is how things work in local politics often.
The question is why the school even felt the need to call for an evacuation and call emergency responders. I’d have thought the science teacher would know enough to just clear out the room and clean up the spill. If it’s a little spill from a thermometer it should never be made such a big deal. Anyone with common sense or an understanding of chemistry and science should know that.
But if they’re so terrified of this though, then no, they should not be using mercury thermometers in the first place. They’re probably a hold over to years past when clearer minds prevailed.
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September 22nd, 2008 at 1:53 am
But the CHILDRESN will get teh AUTIASMS!!
I prefer the blue goo thermometers, anyway. It’s a prettier colour than mercury.
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September 22nd, 2008 at 2:21 am
I miss the days when a thermometer bulb breaking in the lab was an excuse to chase mercury droplets around the bench top with a pencil and have fun with it for a little while before sucking up the blob with a pipette, squirting it into a bottle and sprinkling a little sulfur powder around to make sure we’d gotten the entire spill.
Tenth grade wasn’t even all that long ago.
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September 22nd, 2008 at 5:36 am
When I was in 9th grade part of our physics curriculum consisted of reconstructing sundry Victorian era electrical experiments, such as ‘Barlow’s wheel’. See link below.
http://www.sparkmuseum.com/MOTORS.HTM
Anyway, the lab kept a 5kg bottle of Mercury in the supplies cabinet for the purpose. Lucky me, I got to fumble and drop the bottle. Pools of mercury everywhere, which my science teacher and I scooped up with the help of pieces of cardboard (not easy at all) and put back in the bottle. The stuff was expensive, as I recall. Before she put the last blob in, she rolled it around in the palm of her hand, looking at it wonderingly. Come to think of it, I wonder if she was hinting at something….Naah.
True 1973 school lab story from India.
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September 22nd, 2008 at 10:57 am
Evacuating a whole school of hundreds of students over a broken thermometer with a few drops of mercury is remarkably idiotic.
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September 22nd, 2008 at 11:12 am
It could have been worse. If someone had been there with a Geiger-teller and in an alarmist mood, he might have got the entire town to be evacuated. It seems unlikely, but with that type of hysteria just about everything becomes possible.
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September 22nd, 2008 at 3:06 pm
We used to play with broken thermometers when I was a kid and we turned out … hmmmm. Maybe the panic isn’t such a bad idea after all!
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September 23rd, 2008 at 1:28 am
I take it you’ve heard the story about the woman who freaked out about mercury, and contacted the fire department, and had her home sealed off and decontaminated… after breaking a compact fluorescent lamp?
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September 23rd, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Luke Weston said:
Yeah I have heard stories like that about CF lamps. Not surprising at all.
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September 24th, 2008 at 1:25 am
This is what we have gotten for running a society in which we are constantly telling people to be afraid of things, to not take responsibility for dealing with stuff and to run to the authorities. It’s also part of the whole ignorance of science and the general fear of technology and science and all that “It’s a chemical. It’s toxic. Therefore it must present an unaccpetable danger” Nobody has any balls anymore and it may be partly due to our litigious society.
Really this is what you get from focusing on that damn PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE
SEE? PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE! YOU GUYS HAPPY NOW? It’s crippled out very ability to function in a world where not everything is padded and sterilized for our safety.
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September 24th, 2008 at 2:37 am
Indeed, I think “get rich quick via lawsuit” has a lot to answer for…
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September 25th, 2008 at 4:29 am
Like others I used to play with broken thermometers as a kid… okay, I now admit it I used to break thermometers to get to the mercury as a kid. Mercury is pretty amazing. I did not eat it and seem to have turned out okay.
In the SF Bay Area a couple times a year a major bridge or freeway artery would be closed for hours because of a “toxic spill” and the hazmat response. People would freak out and the media would jump up and down making a big deal about an “unknown white powdery substance” on the freeway. Invariably it would turn out to be something innocuous like lime, flour or titanium dioxide (painter’s pigment). After a few of these events people got fed up at absurdity of closing the road to detox for baker’s flour. That was probably 15-20 years ago (maybe when the hazmat teams were new) and doesn’t happen anymore so they must have changed their response policy. Step 1 — See if the bag on the freeway says “Arm & Hammer Baking Soda”
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September 25th, 2008 at 9:42 am
IS it even necessary to evacuate the room? I know mercury vapor is toxic, but the vapor pressure is very low and if the spill is just a few drops and the spill can be cleaned in a matter of minutes by scooping it into a bag or something, then do you really need to even get everyone out? I’d think class could continue if the teacher could just clean it up in quick order.
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September 25th, 2008 at 11:11 am
No it is probably not necessary to evacuate the room. That is what the spill cleanup procedure will often say as a precaution just to get those who don’t need to be there out but if it’s a recent spill and small then the vapor issue is really not a big deal because there’s not much surface area, not much time, not much vapor pressure.
If I were the teacher in that circumstance and there were a couple of little bubbles of mercury on a desk or something, I’d just scoop them into a bag with an index card and clean up the glass. Maybe give the area a good wipe-down, as much for glass bits as anything else.
Clearing the room would be favoring caution but probably not really necessary. Evacuating a whole building and calling the fire department is just silly though.
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May 12th, 2010 at 8:46 pm
[...] of environmental toxins has never been higher. Today we live in an age where whole schools are evacuated when someone breaks a mercury thermometer. If you listen to the hype you’d probably believe that there are more toxic and [...]
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August 25th, 2010 at 8:54 pm
[...] of U-238 is reason to dispatch a “technical assistance” team to another country, and we live in a society where schools are closed down and cordoned off because someone broke a mercury … and where major universities worry about radioactivity in buildings which, nearly a century ago, [...]
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January 25th, 2011 at 8:14 pm
[...] Seriously, if this ship really did turn around and head back to port because some heavy waves caused a barrel of uranium concentrate to tip over and spill, then I can only shake my head in disbelief and sorrow for what our culture has become. This ranks right up there with evacuating schools because someone broke a mercury-containing thermometer. [...]
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January 25th, 2011 at 8:14 pm
[...] Seriously, if this ship really did turn around and head back to port because some heavy waves caused a barrel of uranium concentrate to tip over and spill, then I can only shake my head in disbelief and sorrow for what our culture has become. This ranks right up there with evacuating schools because someone broke a mercury-containing thermometer. [...]
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