Mercury in hard to reach places. What to do if a thermometer breaks - how to properly remove mercury? What to do if the thermometer breaks: step-by-step instructions

Today, there are electronic and other modern and safe types of thermometers, but many people continue to use the mercury variety, since these thermometers are considered the most accurate.

At the same time, there is always a risk of accidental breakage of such a device, in which case immediate measures are required, since mercury begins to evaporate very quickly, which poses a threat to human life and health.

This article will introduce the procedure, precautions and other nuances of such situations.

Why is mercury dangerous?

Mercury leaking from broken thermometer, forms small droplets that spread and quite quickly fall into various crevices or are absorbed into the pile of carpets or furniture. Soon it will begin to evaporate and enter the human body, where the dangerous substance will accumulate, causing intoxication.

This is a very dangerous phenomenon that can lead to the following negative consequences:

1. Complex lesions of the oral mucosa.
2. Digestive system disorders.
3. Impaired functioning of the liver and kidneys, since it is in these internal organs Toxic substances accumulate the most.
4. The development of dementia or insanity, which is a consequence of impaired functioning of the brain or central nervous system.
5. The occurrence of depression, apathy, depressed state.
6. Metallic taste in the mouth, increased salivation.
7. Frequent and severe headaches.
8. Death.

What to do if the thermometer breaks: step-by-step instructions

In such a situation, it is necessary to take immediate action, since any delay can lead to dire consequences.

A detailed algorithm of actions is given below:

After eliminating all the consequences of a broken thermometer, it is necessary to carry out wet cleaning and ventilate the apartment daily for a week, as well as consume a large number of liquids to remove mercury from the body.

It is necessary to remove pets and all people not taking part in the liquidation of the consequences from the apartment

Collection Tools

The tools you may need to collect mercury are affordable and can be easily purchased at any store. Inventory usually includes:

1. Pipettes for collecting small drops.
2. Medical syringe without a needle.
3. A plastic or glass container that can be sealed tightly.
4. Disposable rubber gloves to avoid direct contact with mercury.
5. Respirator for respiratory protection.
6. Secure bags or bags for collecting waste or items that have come into contact with mercury.
7. Several plastic bags with a zipper.
8. Flashlight for inspecting surfaces and crevices.

If mercury gets on carpet or furniture

Often, mercury particles end up on the carpet; in such a situation, you must use the following instructions:

1. The carpet needs to be rolled up, and you need to move from its edges to the central part, which will prevent mercury from getting onto the floor.
2. The rolled up carpet is placed in a large plastic bag., but if it is too large for this, then it is allowed to wrap it in film. In this case, it is also necessary to move from the edges to the central part.
3. The carpet is taken outside. It is necessary to spread an impermeable film on the ground over which it will be hung, which will prevent contamination of the soil.
4. The carpet is knocked out by blows, but they should not be strong so that particles do not fly away to the side.
5. Next comes long-term ventilation, its duration is about 3 months.

If mercury gets on furniture, it must be dealt with in the same way as with the carpet or get rid of it altogether.

What not to do

Every person must also know the list of actions that are strictly prohibited to perform after breaking a thermometer:

1. Throwing a broken thermometer into the trash chute or trash heap, since only 2 gr. There will be enough mercury to pollute 6000 m 3 of air.
2. Flushing mercury down the toilet or flushing it down the sink, as this leads to infection of the sewer system, the consequences of which are virtually irreparable.
3. Use a vacuum cleaner as this will cause a lot of negative consequences from the spread of toxic fumes throughout the premises to contamination and damage to equipment.
4. Use a broom, as it has hard rods, which will crush large drops.
5. Touch mercury with your hands.
6. Wash shoes or clothes that have been exposed to mercury particles, it is recommended to get rid of such things.

Calling professionals

Specialists are usually called if it is impossible to independently eliminate the consequences of a broken thermometer or if there is no confidence that all the mercury has been eliminated.

In such cases, you can seek help from the following authorities:

1. Ministry of Emergency Situations, you can contact this service by calling the short number 101.
2. Specialized organizations involved in demercurization.

Specialists will not only help eliminate all consequences and give necessary recommendations, but will also take measurements and take tests to ensure the safety of people in the room.

Disposal and destruction of contaminated items

It must be remembered that mercury is an extremely dangerous metal, therefore, if possible, it is recommended to get rid of all things on which it has come into contact.

In one package or sack you need to collect:

1. A container in which mercury is collected.
2. Tools and materials used for collection.
3. Items that have been in contact with mercury.

After this, the collected package is handed over to the Ministry of Emergency Situations employees, who dispose of it taking into account all the rules so as not to harm the environment.

The thermometer measures temperature quite accurately and has a very small error (no more than 0.1 degrees). Therefore, in many medical institutions Preference is still given to a conventional thermometer. In addition, using a thermometer, body temperature can be measured in several ways (in the armpit, rectally, orally), the surface of the thermometer is easily disinfected, and the device itself does not require mains power or battery replacement. With careful handling, mercury can last for more than a decade, and it is enough low cost(only 20-25 rubles) makes it attractive to the buyer.

Along with undeniable advantages, mercury thermometers also have several significant shortcomings, the main and most serious of which is its fragility. It is very easy to break a mercury thermometer, and this will inevitably lead to air poisoning with toxic mercury vapor.

Why is a broken thermometer dangerous?

If you break or break a thermometer, microscopic glass fragments and balls of mercury will instantly appear on the floor. And if glass can cause trouble in the form of cuts, then mercury vapor, being a strong poison, poses a more serious danger. Due to its properties, the mercury leaking from the thermometer breaks into many tiny droplets, which roll into hard-to-reach places (under the sofa, closet, behind the baseboard, in the cracks of the flooring) and, evaporating, poison the air. If you do not remove all the mercury and the thermometer itself in time, you can get severe poisoning. Accumulating in the kidneys, liver, and lungs of a person, vapors of harmful metals cause chronic intoxication, which manifests itself as skin rashes, stomatitis, diarrhea, vomiting, and chills throughout the body. And prolonged exposure to mercury vapor can affect the human psyche and even cause madness.

Therefore, it is very important to quickly and efficiently collect the contents of the thermometer. To ensure that the premises are cleaned, specialists from the Ministry of Emergency Situations should be called, but you can carry out this procedure yourself, taking all the necessary precautions.

How to collect mercury

If it happens that the thermometer accidentally breaks, do not panic. Before you begin to remove mercury balls, it is necessary to remove from the premises all people who will not participate in the cleaning, as well as animals. It is very important to open the windows in the house to ventilate the room and close the doors to adjacent rooms so that mercury vapor from a broken thermometer does not spread. When collecting mercury, you must wear rubber gloves, it is better to put shoe covers on your feet, and cover your mouth and nose with a damp gauze bandage.

Under no circumstances should you collect mercury using a vacuum cleaner or broom. In the first case, once inside, toxic fumes will be blown out of the vacuum cleaner along with the air. In the second, the broom rods can break small balls into even smaller ones, which will complicate their collection.

The most reliable way to collect mercury if a thermometer breaks is to use an ordinary syringe. Such cleaning will take a lot of time and is quite painstaking, but the mercury balls are guaranteed to fall into the cavity of the rubber bulb and will not disintegrate into smaller parts.

Newspaper soaked in water will also help in removing mercury, as mercury balls will easily stick to it. If the thermometer breaks and mercury leaks out, you can use an adhesive plaster or tape, cotton balls moistened with water or vegetable oil, as well as two sheets of paper, with which, using the principle of a dustpan and a broom, the contents of the broken thermometer are collected with careful movements.

Another easy way to collect mercury is to use a medical syringe. After cleaning, it also needs to be sealed in a jar and sent for disposal along with the broken thermometer.

If it happens that the thermometer breaks on the carpet, then the carpet should be taken out and knocked out in a place where there are no people. Concentration dangerous substance from one broken thermometer is not very large; within three days it will evaporate without harming people or the environment.

After the contents of the broken thermometer are safely collected and ready for disposal, you should treat the “accident” site with a solution of potassium permanganate (2 g per liter of water). But since this product cannot be used in all cases due to the stains it leaves, you can fill the entire area where mercury from a broken thermometer could get in with bleach or any disinfectant containing it. For example, a glass of “whiteness” is taken onto a ten-liter bucket of water and the surface is treated with this solution to convert mercury into a non-evaporating compound. Then we wipe it with a soap solution again, finally removing the mercury from the outskirts to the center (100 g of soap powder and 100 g of soda per bucket of water).

Under no circumstances should collected mercury be thrown into a garbage chute or sewer system. Balls of collected mercury, a broken thermometer, as well as all its contents must be placed in a glass container filled with water, then tightly sealed with a lid and transferred to the Ministry of Emergency Situations. It should be remembered that a few grams of mercury contained in a thermometer can poison up to 6000 m3 of air!

Due to the accuracy of measurements, affordable price and ease of use, a mercury thermometer is still often found in everyday life. It has many advantages, but there is one drawback that can cancel everything out - mercury itself. If you have such a thermometer in your house, then you should definitely know how to collect mercury in case it breaks.

Why is mercury dangerous?

You probably know that mercury is the metal that we most often see in a liquid state at home. The fact that this substance was toxic was known back in ancient times, so they treated it with caution. The vapors of this liquid metal can cause severe poisoning.

When the body is exposed to mercury or its compounds, diseases of the nervous system, kidneys, eyes, and skin occur, the immune system deteriorates, and general health deteriorates. Mercury is especially harmful to pregnant women and the fetus. Young children are highly susceptible to its influence.

If it seems to you that you don’t feel anything when you are constantly near a broken thermometer, then this feeling is deceptive. The fact is that mercury can accumulate in the body, that is, it is a cumulative poison, and over time the poisoning will make itself felt. You will feel headaches and weakness, and regular pills will not help you.

Now it’s clear why you need to urgently collect mercury if the thermometer breaks. How to do this correctly?

First actions

1. The very first thing to do if the thermometer breaks is to remove all its inhabitants from the room. Let children and animals spend some time outside or with friends, otherwise they may accidentally touch the silver balls and swallow them.
2. Next, you need to close the doors to the room where, and open the windows for ventilation. In this case, it is desirable that there are no drafts.
3. If you do not want to call the Ministry of Emergency Situations when the device breaks, and intend to cope on your own, then you need to wear gloves and a cotton-gauze bandage. The bandage is moistened in a solution of soda and water (a large spoon of soda per glass).
4. Put plastic bags on your shoes so you don’t have to dispose of your slippers later.
5. If you don’t have a bandage, you can quickly make one at home from a bandage folded in several layers. Or you can just go to the nearest pharmacy and buy a bandage and disposable shoe covers.
6. First, they collect the fragments of the broken thermometer from the floor, and then proceed to the mercury.

Collection Tools

Now let's take a closer look at how to collect mercury from the floor. Do not throw it in the household waste bin. Usually a container of water (jar) is used, since water prevents the evaporation of mercury. You need to take a jar that you can screw on with a lid. Here's how you can collect liquid metal that has scattered on the floor in small balls:

• rubber syringe;
• syringe;
• wet cotton wool;
• wet newspaper;
• copper plate;
• brush.

All collected mercury We throw the broken thermometer into a jar of water, and after cleaning, you can also throw away your tool with which you collected the toxic metal. The jar is sealed and handed over to the employees of the sanitary and epidemiological service.

Instead of a jar, mercury balls can be swept into a paper envelope with a brush or tassel, and then the remains can be collected with wet newspaper. All the mercury that you collected after the thermometer has broken is finally placed in an airtight container, a strong plastic bag or a rubber glove.

Carpet and furniture

In some cases, mercury from the thermometer can end up on the carpet. What should be done and what remedies should be used in this sad case?

The first thing you want to do when a device with mercury breaks is to collect everything with a vacuum cleaner. However, it will spread the already formed fumes throughout the room, plus the mercury inside will heat up and begin to evaporate intensely, and then you will have to clean the vacuum cleaner itself (or throw it away).

If vacuuming is prohibited, you can use, as mentioned above, a syringe. Drops are sucked up with it, after which it is given for disposal. The broken thermometer itself must also be disposed of. The carpet must be taken outside; if you live in your own home, you can leave it for several days to ventilate.

If you break the device and mercury gets on the furniture, you need to wipe it with a strong solution of potassium permanganate, although this may cause some surfaces to become stained. Ventilate the room well every day and do not sit in it for a long time. Over time, the mercury will evaporate and disappear.

Final cleaning

After cleaning, the place where the device broke must be wiped with a product that will completely eliminate all traces of mercury. Ferric chloride solution is very effective. You can buy it at a chemical store or hardware store. Make a 20% aqueous solution and wipe the surface, then rinse everything off with soap and soda water.

Instead of ferric chloride, which leaves behind stains and is also toxic, use a solution of potassium permanganate or aqueous solutions of any substance containing chlorine. A good remedy at home is bleach. It is diluted at a ratio of 1:5, that is, take a liter of bleach per 5 liters of water.

Thoroughly wash the floor, baseboards, and, if possible, walls in the room where the thermometer broke. After 15 minutes, the chlorine solution is washed off the floor with clean water. For a week, every day they ventilate well the room in which the thermometer broke and do not sleep in this room. You can’t cool the room too much, because this will cause less mercury to evaporate and stop ventilating.

To be sure that there is no danger to you in your home, you can invite employees of the sanitary and epidemiological service and ask them to inspect your home, in which the thermometer was broken.

Today there are instruments that can detect very small concentrations of mercury and find where it is concentrated. There are other specialized companies that deal with mercury recycling. They have products that neutralize mercury and help quickly and efficiently get rid of the consequences of contamination in your home.

How not to collect

Many people try to collect mercury from the floor with a broom or vacuum cleaner. This cannot be done, because then the metal will be very difficult to remove from the twigs of the broom, as well as from the inside of the vacuum cleaner. While a broom is easy to dispose of, the situation is different with a vacuum cleaner. If you subsequently use a vacuum cleaner that is poorly cleaned of mercury, you will spread harmful metal fumes throughout your home.

Some people have a desire to collect mercury from a broken thermometer with a magnet, but this will not yield anything, since, despite its metallic luster, mercury is diamagnetic. Moreover, when you try to collect the balls with a magnet, they may roll to the side. The diamagnetic material actually interacts with magnetic field, only very weakly and is not attracted, but repelled from the magnet.

Let us explain why you should not throw mercury and a thermometer that has broken into the trash can or into the toilet. If you do this, the mercury will move from your home into the surrounding atmosphere. It can settle on sewer pipes and get into the ground and air, end up on car wheels, etc. Of course, a small amount of it is unlikely to harm the environment, but if all people do this, then in the end we ourselves will create an environment hazardous to our health. Let's at least think a little and take care of ourselves.

We must remember that a mercury thermometer should be handled carefully: do not give it to small children and store it in a special capsule that protects it from shock. You should also not leave the thermometer at hand while dozing, much less fall asleep with it.

Today, a large number of electronic instruments for measuring temperature have appeared. They allow you to make your life safer, so use them safely and take care of your health.

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.

For mercury to turn into solid, it needs to 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 immediately, although in some cases a weak body that is not resistant to mercury can receive an excessive dose in a matter of minutes.

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Once ingested, mercury settles in human organs, causing great harm to the heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, brain and skin. The first symptoms may appear several hours later, 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. Further, an upset stomach, pain in the throat and bleeding from the gums and nose begin. All this leads to high fever, cough and inflammation of the lungs, which are accompanied by swelling, including swelling of the respiratory tract. In extreme cases, a mental disorder occurs where the person's consciousness may become unsettled.

The great danger is that mercury is odorless, tasteless and brightly colored. The so-called silver water can remain completely invisible to a person for a long time.

It is important to know that children and women are more susceptible to mercury poisoning.

Safe mercury removal

Before collecting mercury from a 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 all the unnecessary people have left the room, you need to open the windows to enter 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 must wear gloves and cotton gauze bandage. It is advisable to have rubberized or completely rubber gloves. A bandage to protect the respiratory tract can be soaked in a soda solution. This will give greater protection. You can make a bandage yourself from bandages or gauze.

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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.

1. 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.
2. A large syringe without a needle, like a syringe, will work well to draw in harmful liquid metal.
3. Mercury beads stick well to tape, adhesive tape and adhesive tape.
4. 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.
5. 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 is important to place all collected elements in 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 with clean water. For more information about cleaning principles, watch this video: