What is the OSHA approved cleanup required for several (15?) grams of spilled mercury?

Question

Some dumbass put in a mercury wetted 50A switch upside down in a UV power supply and it blew apart on a concrete floor.

Answer 1

Mercury spilled is not a good thing. But don't get too worked up, elemental mercury is not nearly as toxic as methyl mercury (or any organomercurate).

You can buy spill kits from Aldrich or VWR. Or you can add elemental sulfur to it, then sweep it up. Either way, you'll need to properly dispose of the waste by contacting a waste disposal company. You just can't put this stuff in the garbage...unless you crave hefty fines and bad media coverage.

(When sulfur is added to the spilled mercury, it "visualizes" the mercury by turning from yellow to brown - and forms mercuric sulfide. Dusting the area with this powder also reduces mercury vapors).

Let me know if this helps.

Answer 2

I once had to clean up a mercury spill from a mercury displacement solenoid in a heat-sealer that caught on fire. Some genius built it so that the solenoid was above the heating elements; mercury doesn't vaporize well at room temperature, but if it had hit those red-hot elements, we all would have been in trouble.

As has been noted, sulfur is good for sweeping up spills; a few old-fashioned stores and pharmacies still sell it as "flowers of sulfur," or "Frasch sulfur" (after the Frasch technique used for getting sulfur out of the ground). Failing that, zinc powder is good, forming an amalgam that makes it easier to collect and sequester. If you have lab vac, put together a small trap with a side-arm Erlenmeyer and get some tubing and a bit of glass; Pasteur pipettes do well for the suction nozzle. Get up as much as you can as elemental mercury, and store under water to reduce the vaporization to negligible amounts. Make SURE you have a trap inline so you don't get mercury in your lab vac system! You'll want something like the "moisture trap" in the image in the references, with one of the tubes leading to the vacuum, and the other leading to your nozzle that sucks up the mercury. Don't get mercury in your pump- that'll just double your work, as you'll have to change the oil and deal with THAT as haz-mat.

15 grams should work out to 2-3 mL at most, so it's not a big spill. Make sure you check anywhere the beads might run, particularly floor drain traps, baseboards, that sort of thing. If you have health/safety people (and they really are the ones who should be doing all this, if you have them) they might have a mercury "sniffer" to see if it's all gone. Have them check for vapor, and bring in a cannister vacuum with a mercury trap and filter.

Ain't nothing quite like a good mercury spill to put a kink in your day. Good luck.

Answer 3

slap that guy in the face