COMensarations
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Turn Your Living Room Into a HAZMAT Incident Site
The unintended consequences of going for the new Compact Florescent Light (CFL) bulbs
An interesting article in the Chieftain today. It’s all about what are the immediate and long-term actions to take in the event that you or your child or your idiot cat knock-over a lamp and cause a CFL bulb to break.
The story is not very pretty. And certainly not something that we hear from all these people pushing these wonders of modern technology on us.
The upshot is that once the bulb breaks, you’ve turned that room into a hazardous materials (HAZMAT) site. You have to evacuate all children and animals from the area. Open all windows and doors to ventilate the mercury vapor. Clean the area of all shards and, if you’ve got a $5000 oriental rug there, cut out the affected portion and dispose of it. Won’t THAT look nice. Better buy a larger end-table to cover the missing piece.
If you were foolish enough to use your $300 vacuum cleaner to clean up the shards, you have to trash it and buy a new one.
That mercury is nasty stuff.
Maybe Congress should have been a bit more careful about passing that legislation requiring us to move to this technology.