All people monitor their health to one degree or another. If you feel unwell, you need to measure your body temperature. This simple and safe procedure allows you to quickly and accurately determine the condition of the body.
Mercury thermometers are most often used for this purpose, since they are inexpensive and more accurate than their electronic counterparts. The disadvantage of glass mercury thermometers is that they tend to break.
Leaked mercury can cause serious harm to the human body, so you need to be able to quickly and correctly remove it from the surface on which it has fallen. Despite the rarity of such situations, everyone should know how to collect mercury from the floor.
Why is mercury dangerous for humans?
Most often, mercury spills from a broken thermometer or lamp.
Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature. It is a white-silver liquid that begins to evaporate already at +18°C.
In order for mercury to turn into a solid, it must be cooled to -38°C, which is difficult to achieve at home. From a broken thermometer it flows out in the form of balls scattering across the floor in all directions. Rolled into different places At room temperature, mercury balls begin to evaporate, poisoning the air.
Mercury poisoning occurs when excess mercury vapor enters the human body. When air with a mercury content of 0.25 mg per 1 m3 of air is inhaled, the substance settles in the lungs.
At higher concentrations, liquid metal vapors are absorbed by the lungs and human skin.
One thermometer contains 2 grams of substance, which in milligrams is 2000 mg. This amount of mercury can poison from 6000 to 8000 m3 of air with rapid evaporation. The air volume in an apartment with an area of 50-60 m2 is 125-150 m3. If a thermometer breaks, the volume of the dangerous substance may be enough to poison 10 people.
The most dangerous thing is mercury vapor
Poisoning at low concentrations of the substance does not occur instantly, although in some cases a weak organism that is not resistant to mercury can receive an excess dose in a matter of minutes.
Once ingested, mercury settles in human organs, causing great harm to the heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, brain and skin. The first symptoms may appear after several hours, so it is difficult to immediately determine the degree of poisoning.
Metal vapor poisoning occurs very quickly
The first symptoms include weakness and dizziness. Then comes nausea and migraine. Next, indigestion begins, painful sensations in the throat and bleeding from the gums and nose. All this leads to high fever, cough and inflammation of the lungs, which are accompanied by edema, including respiratory tract. In extreme cases, a mental disorder occurs when a person's consciousness may become unsettled.
The great danger is that mercury is odorless, tasteless and bright color. The so-called silver water can for a long time remain completely invisible to humans.
It is important to know that children and women are more susceptible to mercury poisoning.
Safe mercury removal
Before collecting mercury from broken thermometer, you need to quickly make some preparations. It is also necessary to quickly select the appropriate tools in order to completely get rid of the harmful substance.
Initial steps
If the thermometer breaks and mercury rolls out in balls on the floor, the first thing you need to do is remove the children from the room. Then, all those who will not participate in the cleaning, including pets, must leave it.
After everyone has left the room, you need to open the windows to let in fresh air. The door must be tightly closed. It is advisable to carry out the ventilation procedure in such a way that drafts do not carry air into other rooms.
You can collect metal balls with a syringe or syringe
Before collecting mercury from a thermometer from the floor, you need to protect yourself with gloves and a cotton-gauze bandage. It is advisable to have rubberized or completely rubber gloves. A bandage for respiratory protection can be soaked in soda solution. This will give greater protection. You can make a bandage yourself from bandages or gauze.
You should not step on mercury balls, so it is better to wear some shoes wrapped in cellophane on your feet.
Before removing the mercury, all the fragments of the broken thermometer are collected. To avoid cutting yourself, you need to carefully place them in a jar of water, which can later be closed with a lid and given for disposal.
All these measures must be taken before collecting mercury. The most important thing is to take care of the safety of others.
How and with what mercury is collected
Mercury must be collected in a container with water. This is done so that the liquid metal cools and stops evaporating. For more information about collecting mercury, watch this video:
The following devices are well suited for collecting mercury balls.
- Syringe - a medical rubber bulb is very suitable for collecting harmful mercury balls. Even balls that have rolled into the cracks are pulled into it.
- A large syringe without a needle, like a syringe, will work well to draw in harmful liquid metal.
- Mercury beads stick well to tape, adhesive tape and adhesive tape.
- Using a brush, you can remove balls of the substance by rolling them onto a sheet of paper or foil. Then, the harmful material collected on the sheet must be placed in a jar of water.
- Cotton wool soaked in water sunflower oil or potassium permanganate, can also be used to collect mercury. She will stick to them.
The most important thing is to clean calmly, consistently and carefully. If you use protective equipment, mercury vapor will not cause much harm. Therefore, having completed the initial steps in the established order, you can sequentially begin assembling the rolled balls. It's important to send everything collected elements into a container of water, which must be kept closed.
Room treatment and precautions
After cleaning, the room in which the mercury has scattered must be thoroughly washed. This can be done using a chlorine-containing liquid. It is necessary to wash the floor, baseboard and, if possible, walls with a chlorine solution. The chlorine solution must be left for 15-20 minutes, then rinsed off clean water. For more information about cleaning principles, watch this video:
The room must be ventilated daily for 7-10 days. It is advisable to support high temperature inside the room so that the remaining mercury can evaporate and leave the room. Ventilation is carried out at dense closed door to avoid drafts and potential movement hazardous air to other rooms.
You can’t stay in the room overnight until it’s completely finished. preventative treatment. Rolled under the baseboard or into something else hard to reach place A ball of mercury can cause considerable harm to human health.
Personal hygiene measures after cleaning
Personal clothing used for cleaning must be hung outside for ventilation. Then it must be chemically cleaned.
After finishing cleaning, you must wash your hands with soap. Then you need to thoroughly brush your teeth and rinse your mouth with a manganese solution. After this, you can take a shower to cleanse your entire body.
For preventive purposes, a person removing mercury can take up to 10 tablets activated carbon. It is also recommended to drink as much as possible throughout the day. more water, from 3 to 5 l.
All other interior items that have had contact with mercury are collected and taken outside. They can only be used after chemical treatment.
The first drug for mercury poisoning is activated carbon
Depending on the complexity of the situation, you can contact specialized services that will help eliminate the infection. Work like government organizations based on sanitary epidemiological stations, as well as private companies certified in this area.
As a last resort, you can contact the emergency response service by calling hotline 01 to receive advice and procedures for the time it takes for the rapid response vehicle to arrive.
Mercury in different quantities found in thermometers, thermometers, fluorescent lamps ah, televisions and other equipment.
If this metal, harmful to human health, gets into the open space, you need to carefully and consistently carry out the entire range of actions aimed at protecting nearby people.
Mercury vapor is a strong poison. It is important to remember this when coming into contact with her beautiful white and silver balls.
A mercury thermometer, despite the development of technology, is quite often used to measure body temperature. It can be found in almost every home, although in general it is gradually being replaced by electric thermometers - safe and easy to use. But since exactly mercury thermometer is the cheapest option for temperature measuring devices, they continue to buy it. And a situation may occur that one day it will break. How to remove mercury from the floor? What to do in such a situation?
A mercury thermometer consists of glass, inside of which there is a small reservoir filled with mercury. There is an absolute vacuum inside the device; there is no air there. If such a thermometer is broken, then the danger to a greater extent is not the small glass that has fallen on the floor, but the mercury itself.
Mercury is a heavy metal and is a beautiful substance silver color. It is fluid, which allows it to rise along the thermometer when heated. The substance belongs to hazard class I. Mercury is used in medicine, mechanics, metallurgy, and for the manufacture of fluorescent lamps. This metal has special properties. For example, already at an air temperature of only +18 degrees it begins to evaporate - toxic fumes enter the atmosphere. They are a strong poison, but do not emit any odor, which makes them even more dangerous.
Note! If you break a thermometer, there will be 2-4 g of mercury in the air. However, this negligible amount of substance can pollute about 6,000 m3 of clean air.
Mercury is a fluid metal; when a thermometer is broken, it is divided into a mass of small balls, which can easily roll anywhere - into, under the baseboard, get stuck in the pile of the carpet or under furniture. For a long time mercury balls will evaporate, poisoning the air in the room, and they are so small that sometimes it is not possible to find them at all.
A person inhaling mercury vapor exposes his body to danger. Mercury begins to accumulate in his body, intoxication with this substance occurs, which can cause irreversible consequences and health problems. First of all, they suffer skin, nervous system, liver, kidneys, teeth. The amount of mercury in the thermometer is enough to poison 10 people. The danger also lies in the fact that poisoning with this substance is a long-term process, and the symptoms will not be noticeable immediately. About 80% of mercury enters the body through the respiratory system.
Table. Main symptoms of mercury poisoning.
Acute poisoning occurs no earlier than a few hours after the thermometer breaks, if no measures are taken. Chronic poisoning will only appear after several years. The degree of poisoning by this substance will depend on the amount of mercury in the house, the duration of exposure to its vapors, and the state of human health. Mercury is most dangerous for children and pregnant women.
In general, mercury thermometer not dangerous if handled with care. Under no circumstances should it be given to children to play with, and it is recommended to store it only in special cases. They will help protect the thermometer even after a fall. If the device breaks anyway, the mercury will not roll across the floor, but will remain inside the case.
If such a disaster occurs, then the first thing is to remove all people from the premises, especially children. This also applies to pets. Both they and children will not find mercury balls dangerous; they may start playing with them, which will only worsen the situation.
Then it is important to close the door to the room where the thermometer broke. It is recommended to open all windows in the apartment. And you will have to ventilate often and regularly, so that all the toxic fumes are certainly gone. However, it is important that there is no strong draft in the room, otherwise the mercury will spread throughout the floor.
Note! If the thermometer fell in its case and broke, but the container remained closed, then the task of removing mercury from the room is greatly simplified.
Collection Tools
To clean a room from mercury, the person who will be doing it will need the correct equipment. You should put a gauze bandage on your face soaked in a soda solution (1 tablespoon of the substance is diluted in a glass of water). You can also use a dry dressing, but then its effectiveness will be lower.
Shoe covers are put on your feet or plastic bags, they can be fixed with tape. And they put rubber gloves on their hands.
Why is mercury dangerous?
Toxic vapors of this metal (and they begin to evaporate at temperatures from +18 ° C) can enter the body. Moreover, some of the drops will probably “scatter” and penetrate into the cracks of the floor and baseboards, carpet pile, etc. You won’t notice them, but mercury, actively evaporating, will gradually poison the air and your body. This poison is cumulative, that is, it gradually accumulates and “settles” in the body.
What does this mean? Accumulated mercury causes chronic mercury intoxication: after some time, a metallic taste appears in the mouth, stomatitis, dermatitis and anemia, headaches, problems with stool, kidneys, tremors in the limbs.
How to remove mercury
Very carefully, but this can be done independently, as environmentalists write. First, you need to remove children and animals from the room. If it's cold outside, open the window: this will slow down evaporation. But it is important to prevent a draft, otherwise the mercury will “scatter”.
You should put shoe covers or plastic bags on your feet to avoid stepping on mercury. Put rubber gloves on your hands, and a disposable mask with gauze soaked in a soda solution inside on your face.
The next step is to prepare a glass container (you don’t mind, you’ll have to give it away later) with water or a solution of potassium permanganate. You will need to place the collected substance and fragments into it.
We take two sheets of paper and cotton wool moistened with a 0.2% solution of potassium permanganate. An alternative to cotton wool is tape, a damp paint brush, dampened paper, or a syringe. With their help, you need to roll balls of mercury onto a sheet of paper and place them in a glass container.
The container with mercury and water should be tightly covered with a lid and it is better to take it to the balcony - away from heating devices. But under no circumstances should you throw it down the garbage disposal or flush it down the toilet.
Treat the area where the mercury was with a concentrated solution of potassium permanganate or chlorine.
How not to collect mercury
Under no circumstances should you collect mercury with a broom or vacuum cleaner. Mercury together with air will pass through the vacuum cleaner engine, and on engine parts made of non-ferrous metals, a mercury film - amalgam - is formed. And then microdroplets of mercury will disperse with the air throughout the apartment.
“Once we came to a call from a grandmother who had broken a thermometer,” says technical director Testeco laboratory Alexander Kuksa. – The maximum permissible concentration of mercury is 300 nanograms. When the thermometer broke, the figure increased to 7,000. But that’s nothing. Then she wiped the mercury with a wet cloth and vacuumed the room. The concentration increased to 156,000 nanograms."
It is also not worth washing clothes in which you removed mercury. This can lead to harmful metal contamination in the washing machine. All things that came into contact with mercury will have to be thrown away.
Where to return a broken thermometer in Moscow
In theory, everything is simple. Call from mobile phone call 112 (from the landline - 01) and say that the thermometer has broken. They will write down your address, and if the tips above did not help, they will advise you and come directly to your home. It's free.
In practice, it all depends on the workload of ministry employees and the place where you live. If for some reason the Ministry of Emergency Situations cannot help you promptly, you can call a paid mercury cleaning service. It is expensive - from 5,000 rubles and above (plus a 50% surcharge for traveling at night).
“The procedure and its price depend on the situation,” explains Alexander Kuksa. “We come, collect mercury, then use instruments to measure the concentration of mercury vapor in the air. If it is still elevated, we look for local sources - mercury balls could have rolled into the cracks of the parquet, behind the sofa, or into the carpet pile.
The Ministry of Emergency Situations does not always take on minor cases with a thermometer. In our practice, there was a story about a woman who bought a new apartment in the center of Moscow and found a three-liter bottle on the balcony. broken jar with mercury. Here, of course, employees of the Ministry of Emergency Situations quarantined the house, carried out measurements, monitoring and processing for six months.”
"R here it is transferred for storage to a special unit of constant readiness of the State Institution “Fire and Rescue Center” (Moscow, Marshal Zhukov Ave., 79), explained Recycle in the Ministry of Emergency Situations in Moscow. “Next, mercury and mercury-containing waste are sent for further processing to NPP Ecotrom, which has an Agreement on the procedure for interaction between the Main Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations in Moscow.”
The collected mercury is usually put back into production - for example, it is purchased by factories that produce measuring instruments.
Many have already classified mercury thermometers as anachronisms, but they measure temperature more accurately than newfangled electronic and infrared thermometers, and are cheaper. There is one drawback - they break and toxic mercury leaks out of them. How to collect mercury from a broken thermometer from the floor or carpet?
Interesting facts
Mercury itself does not pose a threat to humans. If you swallow a metal ball, it will leave the body naturally. However, its vapors and salts are toxic. Signs of acute poisoning become obvious after 2 hours: weakness, metallic taste on the tongue, vomiting, diarrhea, cough, and possible fulminant development of pneumonia.
Chronic poisoning is caused by long-term inhalation of mercury vapor, leading to damage to the kidneys, liver, nervous system. In the 17th-19th centuries, workers in French and English hat factories suffered from this disease due to the fact that hare skins were treated with mercury salts to obtain first-class felt. Hatters suffered from terrible coughs, neuroses and psychoses.
This is where the English expression “mad as a hatter” comes from, as well as the eccentric Mad Hatter from “Alice in Wonderland.” But we must understand that over the course of a year, up to 10 kg of mercury passed through the hands of these unfortunate people (for comparison, 1-2 g in a thermometer). Moreover, they dealt with metal not in balls, but in the form of salts and vapors, which they inhaled for decades in closed workshops.
Hence the conclusion: a broken thermometer is not a reason for fun, but there is no need to panic uncontrollably. The main thing is to clearly know how to collect mercury from a broken thermometer.
Procedure
The first thing to do is to remove children and animals from the room where the thermometer broke. You need to open the window, but do not create a draft - otherwise the mercury balls will scatter everywhere in the form of fine dust. Next:
- Wear rubber gloves, a wet gauze mask, and shoe covers. You should prepare a jar of cold water or a strong solution of manganese. You should immediately put a thermometer in it.
- Do not grab a vacuum cleaner, rag or broom. With their “help” the metal will only disperse throughout the apartment.
- How to collect mercury from a broken thermometer - suitable cotton pad, soaked in a strong solution of potassium permanganate and wound on a knitting needle. You can use a wet shaving brush, tape, adhesive tape, plasticine, paper napkins moistened with oil. During the collection process, it is better to illuminate yourself with a flashlight or lamp.
- The collected drops are sent to a jar of cold water, which is placed on the balcony and stands there until employees of the Ministry of Emergency Situations or special demercurization services arrive. But you can screw the lid on the jar and take it to the trash (namely, to an outdoor container). You should not pour mercury down the drain, sink, or simply throw the can into the garbage disposal.
- The spill area must be treated with a concentrated solution of potassium permanganate, bleach or Belizna. The infected room must be ventilated over the next 5-7 days.
How to collect mercury from a carpet? No, it's easier to throw it away. Or carefully roll from the edges to the center, wrap in big package, take it outside and knock it out, then send it to the dry cleaner.
Several things will help to minimize the terrible consequences: simple tips. What you can do:
- Buy an electronic or infrared thermometer, and use a mercury one when the temperature needs to be measured with an accuracy of a tenth of a degree.
- Store thermometers in a case away from animals and children. Do not threaten children with a thrashing for breaking a thermometer - otherwise the child will hide it in a secluded corner, where it will foul for years.
A home “spill” of mercury is a fixable matter, the main thing is not to panic.