Odessa Texas. An eight grader brought a little bit of liquid mercury to school and some kids ended up playing with it. The school ended up sending sixty kids and staff to 2 local emergency rooms and brought in a hasmat team out of Dallas to check the school out. If they would have called a poison control authority they could have told them it was basically harmless. We played with the stuff occasionally as kids. No one has croaked from mercury poisioning. It will be interesting to see what this cost the taxpayers.
As crazy as it sounds, I would have done the same thing. This is the type of stuff parents get needlessly freaked out about and news crews parked in front of your school. When dealing with a situation such as this, you have to take every precaution, facts be damned. You cant count on the media to tell the simple fact that it is harmless. They make money when people are running around scared and will do whatever it takes to achieve that goal. You have to be able to look at the cameras and say: 1. We believe this is harmless. 2. We took every precaution to verify that. 3. This is our plan to make sure this doesn't happen again.
I think you guys are being a bit harsh. I have worked on ranches and nuclear warships and like to consider myself a fairly educated guy with some decent working man's knowledge. If I saw kids playing with mercury, personally I'd be calm but freaking out on the inside. I guess it comes from always being taught that it is pretty harmful stuff. Maybe that's unfounded, maybe the school overreacted. Granted I'm not a chemist, but what harm was done by their actions? They weren't patronizing these kids, they simply took hazmat actions after they found the substance. Sounds like a responsible staff to me.
Mercury spill in the chem lab with only a few students during that period at a high school where there's a chem teacher that knows the clean up protocol? Not a big deal. The fact they sent 60 kids suggest a whole bunch of kids were paying with and exposed, potentially inhaling mercury fumes as it evaporated at room temperature. Is there a link?
what do they do when a cfl bulb breaks?(mercury compound inside) I guess most of the bulbs at schools are the long fluorescent types though.
I don't have a dog in the fight. I just read this. I know I should probably have my conservative credentials revoked for linking something from the State of New York...
Sorry, I should have said that at room temperature, the evaporation rate of mercury is incredibly slow. It does happen, just not at a rate that would threaten anybody's health from inhalation of mercury vapors.
