Mercury Spill
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Mercury Spill
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Re: Mercury Spill
#2[deleted]
Re: Mercury Spill
#3I wonder how many of these spills go unreported! In high school one of my classmates told me how he used to crack open thermometers and play with the liquid. I don't know if it was mercury or not, but it seemed to be, and he was completely unaware of how toxic it was.
Re: Mercury Spill
#4I wonder how many of these spills go unreported! In high school one of my classmates told me how he used to crack open thermometers and play with the liquid. I don't know if it was mercury or not, but it seemed to be, and he was completely unaware of how toxic it was.
My mother told me that when I was very young (too young to remember), I was sick and she stuck a thermometer in my mouth to take my temperature. And I promptly bit the end off it, and had to be rushed to the hospital to have my stomach cleaned out of mercury.
Re: Mercury Spill
#5Yikes. I'm glad my house was built in the 80's. No asbestos, no lead in the paint, no mercury hiding out in my ceiling.
How dangerous was this contamination, though? I know mercury evaporates, and that it is an air quality concern, but given its location and assuming normal levels of indoor air movement, is it worth $50k to abate it?
I tend to be skeptical of mold issues, for example, but I also imagine that mercury is way more harmful than mold spores, mostly because you can't smell mercury.
Re: Mercury Spill
#6This does seem like a good case for small claims court against Honeywell. It's probably limited in what they could recover but they could at least get some of that back.
Re: Mercury Spill
#7Maybe the lesson is to save.
There's a huge number of very unlikely risks. Too many risks to carefully avoid them all. Something unexpected will happen. Insurance can help, but as the articls shows, not always.
Re: Mercury Spill
#8This does seem like a good case for small claims court against Honeywell. It's probably limited in what they could recover but they could at least get some of that back.
[deleted]
Re: Mercury Spill
#9Yikes. I'm glad my house was built in the 80's. No asbestos, no lead in the paint, no mercury hiding out in my ceiling. How dangerous was this contamination, though? I know mercury evaporates, and that it is an air quality concern, but given its location and assuming normal levels of indoor air movement, is it worth $50k to abate it? I tend to be skeptical of mold issues, for example, but I also imagine that mercury…
The article says: There were still areas in that room that were .037 milligrams per cubic meter.
Wikipedia gives the following info: Chronic exposure by inhalation, even at low concentrations in the range 0.7–42 μg/m3, has been shown in case control studies to cause effects such as tremors, impaired cognitive skills, and sleep disturbance in workers.
Even if the first number is as high as it is because they handled it, things like that they found it while sweeping the kitchen suggests that not all of it was sitting quietly somewhere, but was possibly disturbed regularly or even ingested. Given that mercury stays in the body for decades and is especially bad for children, that doesn't seem like something one should risk.
(+ of course once the building is condemned, you can't really say "yeah, ok, no, we'll risk it")
Re: Mercury Spill
#10Yikes. I'm glad my house was built in the 80's. No asbestos, no lead in the paint, no mercury hiding out in my ceiling. How dangerous was this contamination, though? I know mercury evaporates, and that it is an air quality concern, but given its location and assuming normal levels of indoor air movement, is it worth $50k to abate it? I tend to be skeptical of mold issues, for example, but I also imagine that mercury…
Unless your house was built in the very late 80s, there's still a possibility that asbestos could still have been used in your house.
Mercury is far more toxic than mold, unless you have asthma or an allergy to mold. I've known people that have lived in mold infested houses with no side effects, so it's not instant death like the lawyers would like to make you think.