Mercury spill in university chem lab discovered after five months

Providence College called in Environmental Health and Safety, which called in Clean Harvest, an outside company that handled the spill with the help of the college director of emergency management.

PROVIDENCE, RI (Providence Cowl) April 7, 2011 --  A professor March 24 discovered mercury on a ventilation hood in Hickey Hall 254, a shared research lab at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. The department chair of chemistry and biochemistry was informed, and cleanup began instantaneously.

"We immediately called Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) on campus and quickly decided it was too big of a problem for us to solve ourselves," the chair said. "EHS called Clean Harvest, which is an outside company that handles spills of this sort. "Over the next few days we discovered the spill was even bigger than we thought. We started to see it in more places. Once we knew to look for it, we identified it to be in many places throughout the lab."

The college's director of emergency management and the EHS director were called in to help with the cleanup.

It was later learned that the spill occurred in October, when a professor was working on research with undergraduates. The department chair identified eight students and a few professors as having been exposed to the mercury.

"While it was a good thing that the spill happened in the hood, it was also a bad thing," he said. "In a hood, air flows in all the time and the chemicals go out the roof. There is a lot of airflow through a ventilation hood, 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

Link: http://www.thecowl.com/news/mercury-spill-in-chem-lab-discovered-after-five-months-1.2147352

Source: DHS Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report