What to Do When Your Compact Florescent Bulb Breaks

Since Congress has so graciously made incandescent bulbs illegal after 2012, you're going to need to know what to do should one of your legally mandated compact florescent bulbs break. From the Boston Globe:

Compact fluorescent lamps contain small amounts of toxic mercury that can vaporize when the bulbs break, creating a potential health risk for infants, young children, and pregnant women. If a lamp does break, follow these cleanup procedures:

Keep people and pets away. Open windows, and leave the area for 15 minutes before beginning the cleanup.

Do not use a vacuum cleaner, even on a carpet. This will spread the mercury vapor and dust and potentially contaminate the vacuum.

Wear rubber gloves.

Carefully remove the larger pieces and place them in a secure closed container, preferably a glass jar with a metal screw top lid and seal like a canning jar.

Next, scoop up the smaller pieces and dust using two stiff pieces of paper such as index cards or playing cards.

Pick up fine particles with duct tape, packing tape, or masking tape, and then use a wet wipe or damp paper towel.

Put all waste into the glass container, including all material used in the cleanup. Remove the container from your home and call your local solid waste district or municipality for disposal instructions.

Continue ventilating the room for several hours.

Wash your hands and face.

As a precaution, consider discarding throw rugs or the area of carpet where the breakage occurred, particularly if the rug is in an area frequented by infants, small children or pregnant women. Otherwise, open windows during the next several times you vacuum the carpet to provide good ventilation.

Isn't it nice to know that Congress wants you to put dozens of potentially hazardous waste dumps in your home? In a related story, also from the Globe:

Compact fluorescent lamps - those spiral, energy-efficient bulbs popular as a device to combat global warming - can pose a small risk of mercury poisoning to infants, young children, and pregnant women if they break, two reports concluded yesterday.

But the reports, issued by the state of Maine and the Vermont-based Mercury Policy Project, urged homeowners to keep using compact fluorescents because their energy-saving benefits far outweigh the risk posed by mercury released from a broken lamp.

They said most danger could be avoided if people exercised common-sense caution, such as not using compact fluorescents in table lamps that could be knocked over by children or pets and properly cleaning up broken bulbs.

Of course, the article doesn't tell us what to do with our table lamps once incandescent bulbs cannot be legally purchased. Maybe we should start the "Incandescent Bulb Underground" where the lightbulbs we'd all rather have can be smuggled to our homes for a reasonable fee.

Given the information in the first item above, how many people are going to do all those things if they break a CFL? This is a real pending health hazard that's being ignored in the name of the global warming religion.