I’ve blogged before about the dangers of mercury. Short-term exposure can cause coughs, sore throat and headache. It can poison your lungs, kidneys and nervous system.

Unfortunately, liquid mercury doesn’t look toxic, it looks way cool. See the shiny globs below.

I’m guessing that mercury’s sexy sheen is ultimately behind the mess surrounding an Arizona High School. A quick summary:

• Five students got hold of mercury at the school and took it home; officials are still gathering details about that
• One or more spills contaminated three classrooms, a locker room and two buses
• The school was closed for five days of decontamination
• The EPA screened 62 homes for contamination
• Two science teachers were moved to non-science classes at other district schools and replaced with substitutes

Sigh. I feel for everyone involved. The more who know that mercury’s dangerous, the better. The more who know that it demands special precautions during testing, cleanup and disposal, the better.

Image © Cerae – Fotolia.com

Bravo, Steve Gherke of The Salt Lake Tribune. Perfect lead sentence in the following news story from this past Tuesday.

I added the sub-heads and excerpted the full story. Please note that no one was injured in either accident.

As of this posting, we have no reports of incidents involving onion rings.

We added this to Map-A-Spill (the first Utah site!)

Click to see Map-A-Spill

Click to see products for emergency spill response

Click to see Map-A-Spill

Click to see products for emergency spill response

Click to see Map-A-Spill

Click to see products for emergency spill response

1. It can be used in conventional, unmodified diesel engines.

2. Its production and use generates about 80% less carbon dioxide emissions and almost 100% less sulphur dioxide than conventional diesel fuel.

3. It smells like popcorn or french fries when burned (mmm, french fries).

4. It will dissolve many paints.

5. It’s as biodegradable as sugar and has 10% the toxicity of table salt. However, biodiesel spills are still subject to EPA regulations and so still require emergency response equipment.

6. A plastic surgeon briefly used liposuction fat to create biodiesel fuel for his car.

Source for items 1-5, supplemented by National Biodiesel Board.

Image © klick – Fotolia.com

This mock oil spill exercise was a nice idea. Student journalists got to grill the Commissioners for the Falmouth Harbour area in the United Kingdom (see map below) and each side gained valuable media training. No water supplies, industries or wildlife harmed in the process.

I looked for transcripts of the “press conferences” online, to see if spill response equipment came up, but no such luck …

Posted in Emergency response, Environmental By Keith

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