Fort Collins Police Seek Missing Hazmat Material; Children Won't Reveal Missing Mercury Location

KMGH-TV/DT Denver ^ | 9.15.03

[abner]

I used to buy mercury by the pound. Triple distilled. Very pure stuff. Very heavy. A half cup of mercury is more like 4 or 5 pounds.

I used it for processing argon tubes(neon lights). The mercury in a tube filled with argon will make the light purple into a bright blue.

I had this great idea that when I needed to get rid of contaminated mercury, I would just send it Parcel Post to Iraq. Fortunately, I sold my shop before I had enough of the contaminated stuff to have to send any to Iraq.

Mercury is very costly to dispose of legally.

[CurlyDave]

What do you want to bet thet the poor guy who had his mercury stolen will get in major league trouble for some reason.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Ok.

Just curious.

[tubebender]

Central Calif had the two largest mercury mines in the US... New Uderia Mine

[pierrem15]

I even managed to make mercury fulminate

Since you're obviously still here, I would guess you didn't use all 8 pounds...

Saw my cousins in FL last year, reminiscing about when we were kids: croosbows made from leaf springs, bamboo blowguns, homemade explosives and tennis ball cannons filled with lighter fluid, mouth siphoning gasoline & homemade flamethrowers made from spray bottles, etc.<p.Ahh, the good old days. I shudder to think what would happen to kids now (or their parents) if they were caught doing that now.

[P-Marlowe]

The unions are suicidal. By encouraging their members to pursue these frivilous claims they have put many of the big high paying contractors into bankruptcy and now 80% of all the construction work that used to be handled by union shops is being subbed out to non-union subcontractors who hire illegal aliens at 1/3 the cost of union tradesmen.

You can thank them later, when your pension funds dry up.

[RonF]

Play with it? I used to make it! I got ahold of a half-pound of mercuric oxide from an old high school lab when I was a kid. I used to heat it up in a test tube, with a stopper and tubing running up into a bottle filled with water upside down in a shallow pan. The bottle would fill with oxygen, and the mercury seemed to stay in the test tube. I figure now that there was mercury vapor in the water and oxygen as well. But I used to put smoldering stuff into the oxygen bottle to watch it burst into flame, and then play with the mercury.

[Chad Fairbanks]

Cool! Me? I was just trying stuff from some stupid left-wing guerilla warfare manuals that a crazy uncle of mine was always sending me in the mail... he was a sick sick man...

Luckily, I always got home to check the mail before the parents got home... heh heh heh

[dalereed]

"Central Calif had the two largest mercury mines in the US"

A contractor I used to do work for had a mercury mine in the Sierras near the headwaters of the American River about 40 years ago.

Most of our mercury come from Spain. It is so plentiful there that it gets leached out of sinabar when it rains and flows into the med. That's why atlantic tuna, which circumvent the atlantic yearly and breed in the med have mercury in them, also the atlantic swordfish have mercury since they dine on the tuna.

Pacific tuna and swordfish don't have mercury since there is so little of it in the Pacific region.

[dalereed]

"You can thank them later, when your pension funds dry up"

I wish they would go belly up yesterday, we were a union shop for 56 years until things got so bad by 92 that I closed the business, i'm out of it!

[GOP_Proud]

We used to chase mercury balls around on the sidewalk all the time.

This reminds me of the "jiminy crickets!" I want to shout everytime I see one of these room makeovers on TV with concrete floors. The designer will take the carpet up and want to do something else with it. The homeowners always scream something about children falling and bumping their heads. Geesh, my mom raised 8 children on concrete floors and we all actually survived...pump knots and all.

Everyone soon tired of the mercury and went on their way. We survived.

And another thing, when did we start eating paint? Oh, my God! Leaded paint! I'm soooo scared. How in the hell are we all even here?

[GOP_Proud]

Had to fix my tag.

[FreedomCalls]

Thermometers, barometers, Dad's dentist office. Mine came from the tilt switch in several old thermostats. You could either break the glass tube to get the mercury out or rig them up and use them intact with a battery, a buzzer, and flashlight bulb as a cheap tilt switch to startle unsuspecting siblings.

[RonF]

My mercury story:

Many years ago I'm working for a well-known medical device manufacturer. Due to a resignation, my possession of an M.S. in Biochemistry, and the personnel dept. being caught flat footed, I'm temporarily Safety Officer for the whole facility. Dumb-ass relative of high-level manager is hired for the summer. Dumb-ass is working in a lab and hooks up a mercury-based pressure gauge. Dumb-ass hooks it up backwards, turns on pump, dumps contents on floor. Then he grabs the special vacumn cleaner we have just to deal with this and vacumns up the mercury. I go to lab to see what's going on. Don't like the looks of what I see inside, ask dumb-ass to get me the vacumn cleaner. I open up vacumn cleaner. It's empty, and I mean empty. The filter the vacumn cleaner needs to work isn't in it; the thing was never assembled (I fortunately had only been on duty for less than a week). Dumb-ass had blown the mercury into vapor all over the lab.

The local municipality had detected mercury in our effluent. We were under watch, with all our waste outputs being tested weekly. A thermometer's worth of mercury down a sink would have caused us to flunk their testing. This shit would have closed the facility. We had to close the lab and have the furnishings and floor disposed of as hazardous waste. As well as dumb-ass's shoes.

[wideminded]

I had a bunch of mercury as a kid that I got from a relative who had a laboratory. Some of it I used to make a barometer. Some of it fell on the floor of my room where it flowed into cracks between the boards of the parquet floor. I assume the vapor was coming out for years. Maybe that's what happened to me.

[CalvaryJohn]

I can't figure out how I managed to live this long growing up with a mercury thermometer in the house. I had asbestos siding and pipe insulation too. Freakin regulations.

[MissL]

This is just a thought....we all seemed to survived without helmets, seatbelts, elbow and knee pads...we did not die from eating pennies or marbles or kill ourselves while playing a game of jacks....nor strangle ourselves in the jump rope...........and yes Mercury was fun to play with but we forget about the lead paint and so many other things that could have or might have affected our generation.

The only thing that frightens me is that soon all of us will be gone....and the kids that seem to want legislation to create a perfect world will be in charge....only Pottery Barn and AX Exchange will exist, and the Gap and Gap Kids. The world is not perfect. But they will trade freedom for "perfect"...WILLINGLY.

Not a good idea....

[11B3]

MissL is nominated for Quote of the Year for her reply above. I've yet to read such a concise representation as to what Free Republic is about than her statement.

[JohnHuang2]

Thanks for the heads-up, friend.

Jayne, check out #57

[weegee]

There are mercury switches in those shoes that flash lights when kids walk. The ecotypes have been having fits that those shoes might end up in a landfill.