Light and knife to the rescue!

S

SarcoBlaster

Joined
Jul 1, 2002
Messages
602
Well, my dad dropped a thermometer about an hour ago and glass and mercury got all over the place. The light in the bathroom wasn't the brightest and it was hard to see the glass. So what do I do? I get my SureFire E2 and light that place up. The mercury doesn't soak into paper towels so I found the syringe (a plastic one that the dentist gave to me after the removal of my wisdom teeth to squirt out any food particles that get trapped in the holes in my mouth) started sucking the mercury into it. Well, the tip was too small in diameter to suck the mercury up so I took my BM 905 and cut the end off. I was glad to have those two things!:)
 
Hi SarcoBlaster,

Mercury Thermometers are banned in the Netherlands, the Mercury is a very toxic product especially when you inhale its vapor. There are special cleaning kits that make use of a kind of sponge to absorb even the tiniest Mercury globules.

Best Scouting wishes from Holland,

Bagheera
 
Yes, it might be obvious but I would wrap the syringe in paper towel/newspaper and double ziplock bag it and dispose - ideally with a mercury disposal/recycling center because this stuff is bad for landfills. A small amount of mercury like that will not give off enough harmful vapor unless you really try to whiff it (it gives off vapor slooooowly). A piece of paper, damp paper towel or sponge should help you get the other tiny globules. I'd use latex or nitrile gloves and go back with typing paper and scoop around just to be sure all the tiny little globs are gone.

Don't wear gold when doing this - it can dissolve into gold = bad.

On the other end, it does sound like the blade and light came in very handy. Always good to hear when EDC items save the day.
 
I'm sure the vapors weren't a problem because the few drops of mercury combined were were much smaller than a dime. It was about half the size of Roosevelt's head.

The thermometer was one of those old ones, not the newer digital ones, so that's why it had mercury in it. For some reason, we needed to know the temperature of some water so he decided to use that instead of the digital ones.
 
Don't you just love it when people ask you why you "have such a knife" or "why do you need a light that cost that much" and then :D they need to use it. OOOOOOOh how sweet,you mean you want to use my what!!!! Imagine what kind of trouble you could have had from the mercury if you could not have illuminated it so well.


Dean
 
Originally posted by SarcoBlaster
The thermometer was one of those old ones, not the newer digital ones, so that's why it had mercury in it. For some reason, we needed to know the temperature of some water so he decided to use that instead of the digital ones.
Click to expand...

Even if it wasn't digital (not what I meant), I thought there was a different substance is traditional type thermometers that wasn't hazardous.
 
I've always heard that mercury thermometers were more accurate than alcohol, but I'm not sure if that's true or not.
 
I worked for a Major oil company with a gentleman who has worked for 20 years doing mercury porrosimetery(sp?) work-- injexting mercury into cores under high pressure. He said that a room temperature the chances of having much mercury vapor to inhale. His machinery is keep at a constant 68°F. He is tested for mercury every 6 months and has not had any in his system in all his years of work.

Bob
 
Twice now a physics lab at a local university out here was working with... well... let's say it was around a golfball sized amount of mercury in a fume hood. To make it simple, the experiment set ups they were working with became pressurized and the mercury splattered in a roughly 10'x10' area.

We hired an emergency response contractor to go out and clean up everything in their level B PPE (looks like spacesuits)with those Hg sponges...

Each time it cost several thousand dollars because the stuff is so regulated.
 
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