Thirty pounds of mercury were recently discovered after being veiled for over half a century in the ruins of Cornell’s former chemistry lab. An excavation team ran into the potentially hazardous element while working on an expansion to the Johnson Museum, a project which covers ground where the Morse Hall chemistry building once stood.

“This is a reportable incident, it’s on the public record, and we’re working with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation until it’s all cleaned up,” Steve Beyers, manager of the Engineering Services Group in the Cornell Office of Environmental Compliance and Sustainability, said.

The dangerous metal was located near a floor drain in Morse Hall’s foundation, as well as in the pipe leading from that drain. Much of the mercury has been salvaged, put into drums and is ready to be reused. But mercury’s extremely malleable quality makes it difficult to contain and even harder to re-collect once it is released into the environment.

“There’s a significant amount of affected material,” Beyers said.

Any earth matter or building material tarnished by the mercury and unable to be separated from the metal falls under the umbrella of “affected material,” all of which will go to a lined landfill, he said.Dangerous discovery: An excavation team working on the new Johnson Museum parking complex uncovered 30 pounds of mercury underground.

According to Beyers, about 15 feet of pipe is still enclosed underground, mud sealing off whatever mercury might be present. Those remaining feet of pipe are beyond the scope of the current excavation, however, thus another approval request is required in order for Cornell to complete the clean up.

Until then, and as the building project continues, air monitoring devices have been installed on site to ensure the safety of the workers and the surrounding Cornell community. The monitors have yet to detect harmful conditions.

“A liter of mercury [which is the equivalent of 30 pounds] could cause a lot of damage if it were let loose,” said Barbara Baird, chair of the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department. She asserts that in contemporary times, a dangerous spill of this kind would never occur.

“There’s a whole protocol with hazardous material now, whereas in the past, people were much less concerned about monitoring these things,” she explained.

Morse Hall, which was built in the 1890s and housed the chemistry department until the 1920s, accommodated a whole different generation of chemistry students and educators.

“Even when I was a kid, if we came across mercury, from a broken thermometer or something, we’d soak our coins in it and watch them get all shiny,” Baird said, as compared to now, when “mercury isn’t used in [Cornell’s chemistry] training program at all.”

“It is fairly unusual. We don’t often find 30 pounds of mercury just laying around,” Matt Romocki, construction inspector of New York State Department of Environment Conservation’s Spill Response Group, said. “But we do have systems in place to address these type of issues.”

In addition to the mercury, the excavation team found approximately 10 pounds of uranium ore and some blue-and-white colored materials, which could either be reacted chemical material or art supplies from the building’s art studio days. In either case, these findings were determined to be neither volatile nor reactive.

According to Patrick Conrad, project manager for the Johnson expansion, the mercury discovery has negative implications for both the project and the University. The additional safety monitoring systems and the loss of recyclable soil inflicts supplementary financial burdens on the university, he explained, as does the treatment processes and future clean up work.

“There is certainly some lost productivity,” said Conrad, which will delay the construction’s completion by an unknown amount of time.