Someone steals a car and they close the school?
Posted on 10/19/2005 7:54:39 AM PDT by Rebelbase
CREEDMOOR (AP) — South Granville High School was closed Tuesday and Wednesday to allow for a search for poisonous mercury stolen from a science lab.
The 1,200-student campus was closed Tuesday as authorities and environmental experts searched the buildings for contamination. The school was closed again Wednesday to continue air testing for mercury vapor.
A school science teacher reported the theft after discovering it Friday afternoon, but an investigation did not begin before Monday, schools spokeswoman Jan Allen said.
Allen and Capt. Danny Eudy, the police department's chief investigator, said an unspecified number of other students toyed with the mercury.
"The students wanted to — I hate to say the word play — they wanted to experiment, touch it, feel it, roll it," Allen said. "They wanted to roll it into balls, to toss it from hand to hand to see what happens when you spread it out."
Mercury poisoning from regular inhalation or skin absorption causes oral inflammation, extremity pain and tremor, weight loss, and mental changes including depression. If eaten, mercury affects the central nervous system. It can impair muscle, vision, and brain functions, leading to paralysis and sometimes death.
Creedmoor Police Chief Ted Pollard said a student admitted taking home at least half of the missing seven ounces of the heavy fluid. The elemental metal was in a clear plastic bottle and weighed 15 pounds. No one has been charged with wrongdoing, Pollard said.
Eudy said the thief, whom he identified as a teenage boy, pilfered smaller amounts during classroom experiments as far back as two weeks ago before stealing the bulk of it earlier last week.
Glad to see that educational curiosity is still alive and well in some teenage minds.
How times have changed.
When I was in school, the science teachers would take the stuff (mercury) out of the bottles and let us play with it.
15 pounds?! That is a LOT of mercury. I used to buy it by the pound and use a drop at a time out of a syringe.
And how! Our family dentist used to give us kids some to play with. (We're talking in the '60s)
"Mercury poisoning from regular inhalation or skin absorption causes oral inflammation, extremity pain and tremor, weight loss, and mental changes including depression. If eaten, mercury affects the central nervous system. It can impair muscle, vision, and brain functions, leading to paralysis and sometimes death. "
--->
This is so over-blown.
Most of the cases of mercury poisoning from handling of the metal are a result of mercury contamination of lead ore, the smelting operations putting copious amounts of mercury vapor in the air, and smelters getting poisoned from that high concentration of mercury vapor.
Liquid metal mercury at room temperatures is very hard to be poisoned by, and the vapor pressure of mercury vapor in air is well below honestly dangerous levels.
Stealing lab supplies from the school isn't "wrongdoing"? Oh, right! It all belongs to the "public" anyway! Think I'll go over to the elementary school and help myself to a few extra desks.
There seems to be a growing list of substances whose health risks in normal circumstances are exaggerated. Lead (in leaded gasoline - never was much of danger), asbestos (has there ever been a proven death from exposure to it outside industrial workers exposed to large amounts on a regular basis, like asbestos miners?), mercury (not only did we play with it as kids, but you know it got spilled on the carpet in homes and slowly evaporated over the years), and mold and mildew (geez, humans have lived with moldy and mildewed stuff in their homes for almost all of history, up until the modern day of central heating and air conditioning, apparently without any serious effect).
Just follow the money, though, and you'll see why these scares have become so overblown - the media loves this type of stuff, various industries make a good living from cleaning up this stuff, politicians love passing new rules and regulations to justify their existence, and so on.
I thought there were several different types - some tame some nasty
Someone steals a car and they close the school?
Think I'll go over to the elementary school and help myself to a few extra desks.
I've got a couple in my classroom if you want.
Someone steals a planet and they close the whole school?
There seems to be a growing list of substances whose health risks in normal circumstances are exaggerated.
lets see, which of these substances are in my house right now...
lead: yup. lots of it. mostly in the form of bullets, some of it jacketed in copper.
asbestos: definately. i have a 8x10 chunk of it. very, very useful when needing to use the torch near flammable objects- like when soldering waterlines in my 100+ year old house.
mercury: yup, i have some old thermometers.
mold/ mildew: i'm sure there's lots. (honey, whats this green stuff in the tupperware in the back of the fridge?"
Too far for me to carry, I'm afraid, but I appreciate the thought!
Too far for me to carry, I'm afraid, but I appreciate the thought!
I thought you tax types could lift more with a pen than a 1000 men could lift in a week. :)
Someone steals the dead lead singer of Queen & the school closes?
Someone steals the messenger to the gods and the school closes?
You win!
That's because chief function of government in our time is to convince people they can't live without it. If this requires whipping the people into a panic about the environment or hurricane evacuation or WMDs, that's not so hard to engineer. And the media are happy to oblige.
Yup. The media absolutely love it, especially on a slow news day.
And the other day there was a thread on how the FDA was gonna ramp up some grand project about "just how many germs does antibacterial soap really kill" or some such rubbish.
Do we really have the resources to do (another) soap study?
Americans are so wussified, it's shamefull.
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