The message wasn’t likely to reassure suburban families exposed to mercury spilled when workers replaced old gas meters: We don’t know if you will face health problems.
The question about possible health repercussions remains unanswered, said John Dellinger, director of the Illinois Poison Center.
“Just like with lead, we don’t know exactly the developmental effects of mercury,” Dellinger said following last week’s announcement that mercury had been spilled in at least 32 homes.
Nicor said it will increase the number of homes it will test for mercury to as many as 200,000 in an effort to allay consumers’ concerns about possible exposure to the substance, a company official said Saturday. Nicor will inspect homes where outdated regulators have been removed as well as those where they are still in use, said a statement by CEO Tom Fisher. In most cases those are homes built before 1961, officials said.
Workers for Pennsylvania-based Henkels & McCoy, a company hired by Nicor Inc., spilled the silver-color metal while removing 50-year-old gas meters from basements. It was part of a 2-year-old program by the Naperville-based utility to replace the meters with newer, outdoor ones.
The old meters used up to 2 tablespoons of mercury–sometimes called quicksilver–to regulate the flow of natural gas into homes. Meters built since the late 1950s do not use mercury.
By Monday, 160 homes in suburbs ranging from Park Ridge and Mt. Prospect to Huntley and Wheaton will have been tested for possible mercury contamination, according to Dan Curry, spokesman for Illinois Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan.
While SET Environmental of Wheeling conducts the tests and the cleanup of spilled mercury, public health officials are struggling to address the public’s concerns about mercury exposure.
The uproar over the spills prompted Ryan last Wednesday to convene a task force of federal and state officials to examine the issue of secondary contamination. The group met Thursday with Nicor and is expected to meet weekly until the issue is resolved, Curry said.
“I think people are moving forward on it quickly, and I think we are making progress on getting our arms around the scope of the problem,” he said.
Nicor does not believe that the other three contractors it hired did any work that was related to mercury, Curry said. But spot checks will be done on some of those homes to make sure there isn’t a problem.
Residences where Nicor workers removed the meters also will be spot-checked, Curry said. Nicor does not anticipate any problems with those homes because their workers were qualified to do the work, he said.
The impact of mercury on the central nervous system has been known at least since the 19th Century, when mercury was used in large quantities to treat felt for fur hats.
Hatters who inhaled mercury fumes for long periods gradually went mad, lending their name to what was then called “mad hatter’s disease.” In 1865, Lewis Carroll put a deranged Mad Hatter character in his “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
When mercury vapor is inhaled, it is passed directly to the brain, said Dellinger, and it can do damage when it is stored in the body’s organs.
According to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1999 study of mercury, if an oral thermometer breaks, less than 0.01 percent of its mercury will be absorbed by the body. But if mercury vapors are inhaled, about 80 percent of the mercury will enter the bloodstream from the lungs, then will quickly deposit itself in the kidneys or brain, where it can stay for months.
For small children and childbearing women, mercury presents a higher risk because it can cause developmental problems with the nervous system, Dellinger said. Pregnant women with high levels of mercury can pass the metal to their infants. Acrodynia, a disease that causes pain in the fingers and toes, can result when infants and children have direct exposure to elemental mercury, though, this is an extremely rare reaction. (This paragraph as published has been corrected in this text.) Dellinger cautioned that these side effects have been documented in long-term exposure to large amounts of mercury–amounts greater than what was spilled from gas meters during their removal from homes.
“The bottom line is that in most of these exposures, even with being exposed to it for a year, it probably won’t cause a measurable effect–but you don’t want to prolong it,” Dellinger said, adding that there is “no such thing as a good or bad chemical; it’s all a matter of the dose.”
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Dellinger was a member of a scientific panel that last month recommended that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lower the levels of mercury that industry, particularly the energy industry business, is allowed to emit into the environment. The panel’s recommendation followed a 10-year debate between industry and the EPA over mercury emissions from coal-burning plants. The EPA is currently revising its standards.
The Illinois Department of Public Health is using a standard of 1 microgram per cubic meter of air as an acceptable level of mercury, said Tom Schafer, spokesman for the department.
“The good thing in all of this is that people are aware of it, and action is being taken,” Schafer said. “It may have been a little late in people being notified and the government being involved, but we are involved now.”
The health department, Schafer said, has “full faith” in the contractor hired to clean up the mercury.
Secondary contamination is also being examined, Schafer said. If a home’s living area was contaminated with mercury, the residents will be interviewed to learn who visited, where they walked and where they went afterward. That way, they should be able to determine whether someone tracked mercury from one home into another.
“They will test those homes for mercury, which then could expand the number to a couple of hundred homes,” Schafer said. “We just don’t know for sure yet. But for those homes that do have a hot spot or they found contamination in the living area, there will be additional work done.”
In Park Ridge, urine test kits were made available on Thursday at the patient resource center of Lutheran General Hospital. In the first three hours, 52 kits had been distributed, said Marcia Opal, a spokeswoman.
A hot line, 888-288-8110, has been set up by the state Department of Public Health to answer questions.
The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency has received numerous calls from people inquiring about the proper way to dispose of mercury since news of the contamination, said William D. Seith, its deputy director.
People may bring such items to the agency’s permanent household hazardous waste collection facilities in Naperville and Rockford.
The office has been “flooded by folks now calling and inquiring about `What do I do with my thermometer?'” Seith said.