Don’t Mess with Mercury
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009A recent snowboarding trip one long weekend was cut short when my cell phone rang and my boss asked if I’d be willing to go to Phoenix. “There’s been a mercury spill in a high school near Phoenix,” he said. “Another one?” I asked. Just one week before, my colleague was sent to Calexico, California to help respond to a mercury spill in a school and help the on-scene coordinator and school district handle the situation. “Yep,” he said. “We got another one.”
I packed up my belongings and headed to Avondale, a Phoenix suburb. I arrived at Agua Fria High School to find emergency responders staged in the “black box” (the school’s drama room) to screen potentially contaminated belongings.
Mercury spills are an immediate health danger. At Agua Fria, a couple of boys got their hands on mercury and split it up into jars and went to their final class of the day.
Emergency responders identified exposed students and retraced their steps to find all potentially contaminated areas. Two buses and five classrooms were contaminated and cleaned up. The 1,700-student high school was closed for three days.
A “lumex” is used to screen for mercury - it looks like a first generation ghost buster (think Igor’s prototype) with a high-pitched whine that could make anyone crazy.
Imagine: you’re a high school student; you find silver liquid that looks cool and beads up like oil in water when you touch it. You bring it to class, throw some at that girl you like, play with it in the locker room, take it home to show your little sister. Now your school’s been closed, EPA officials, the local fire department and the police department are questioning you and pretty much everyone you know. How much did you have? Where did you go? What have you touched? Where are the clothes you were wearing? Do you feel sick?
Two families had to be relocated while their homes were being cleaned up and some students didn’t get some of their belongings back because they were too contaminated to clean up. Those favorite pair of sneakers? Gone. The iPod you got for your birthday? Gone. That sweatshirt you’ve had forever? Gone.
Interestingly enough, a lot of people thought it wasn’t a big deal. Some said they used to play with mercury as children and were fine. There are always arguments about how things used to be done. Sometimes these arguments start with, “In my day…” The best answer I always come up with is that we didn’t know then what we know now.
Mercury is a dangerous neurotoxin, it’s poisonous. Don’t mess with mercury.
About the Author: Margot Perez-Sullivan works in the EPA’s Public Affairs Office in San Francisco handling media relations in Arizona, Nevada and the Navajo Nation. She has also worked for the agency in the Boston and Washington DC offices.


Because the timber was thought to be the only remaining remnant of the fort extending into the river, dredge operators were instructed to avoid it, as well as a section of the river where the timber rested. However, unbeknownst to everyone, another timber was buried in the sediment underneath the exposed timber, and this timber extended past the exclusion zone and into the area approved for dredging by EPA. This second timber was 21 feet long. When the dredge operator came in contact with the buried timber and pulled it upward, it caused the other (exposed) timber to come free from the riverbank.
A flurry of archeological activity has been focused on the timbers and riverbank. Although experts need to determine the extent of contamination of the timbers, this incident now provides an excellent opportunity to carry out a detailed archaeological investigation of both the land area of the fort site, as well as the in-river areas adjacent to the site. The work will focus on defining the context and function of the timbers in question, as well as adding to the understanding of the activities carried out at the fort by controlled excavation and subsequent analysis of recovered artifacts. Of particular interest to the officials in the Town of Fort Edward is the opportunity for the public to observe the excavations.