Jonah notes a story about a lady who broke a fluorescent bulb and is looking at a hazmat cleanup that will cost her two large.
The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges’ house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state’s “safe” level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter.
Do you realize how LITTLE that is?
What exactly am I missing about this mercury thing? Sure, constant exposure to mercury vapor can be fatal, but let’s look at the record.
Dad was a chemical engineer. As such he had access to things that most mortal Americans did not, including a large (well, heavy; that sucker must have weighed five pounds) bottle of mercury. We used to play with that stuff all the time, rolling it around in our hands and so forth. (Perhaps that explains something about me, but I doubt it.) If playing with metallic mercury had been deadly dangerous, he wouldn’t have allowed us to do that. And he would have known. (I mean, sure, eating it would have been bad. Rolling it around in our hands? Unlikely to be an issue so long as we washed up afterward.)
The number of mercury thermometers that I myself recall breaking in childhood was at least two or three.
Yet I don’t recall us ever needing a hazmat cleanup, or growing up with an extra eye or head, or dying from heavy-metal poisoning in childhood. So why would you need a hazmat cleanup for a broken fluorescent light bulb that has something like 1/100th of the amount of mercury found in an old-fashioned fever thermometer?
The nanny state and pseudo-scientific environmentalism strike again.