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It's one of those stories that approached urban legend status. A woman in Maine, Brandy Bridges, broke a CFL on the carpet of her daughter's room. Her simple questions to the Maine DEP about how to clean up the bulb (and the $2000 clean-up cost she was quoted by a private remediation firm) have resulted in a year-long study by Maine DEP and a new set of recommendations for cleaning up broken CFLs. What you should do when you accidentally break a CFL (which, I've got to say, is kind of hard. Especially on a carpet, those things are pretty sturdy, at least the swirly compact ones) boils down to a few common sense precautions:

• Open windows and exterior doors to ventilate and give the room 15 minutes or so for air circulation to drop the mercury levels. Shut the room off from the rest of the home interior during this airing, if that's possible.

• Don't vacuum up the dust, use stiff cardboard or something else disposable to gather up the glass fragments and dust and put them in a disposable container that can be closed (like perhaps an empty peanut butter jar or take-out food container).

• Use gloves, and using the sticky side of some kind of tape (ahh, duct tape can do anything!) go over the area where the bulb broke, picking up any small particles -- even if you can't see anything, go over the area anyway.

• Wipe down the area with wipes or a wet paper towel, and then put the used tape and paper towel/wipe into the sealable container. You can dispose of the container in your normal trash (best to put it outside right away, don't just throw it in the kitchen trashcan).

• Finally, if you break a bulb on a rug, Mass DEP advises people to replace the portion of the rug where the mercury was spilled.

For more information on cleaning up broken CFLs, go to Mass DEP's site here. For more information, the folks at the Mercury Policy Project also released a 23 page report titled "Shedding Light on Mercury Risks from CLF Breakage" which is available on the internet here.

So that's what you should do when you break a CFL. What shouldn't we do?

I don't think we should abandon compact fluorescent lights as a necessary energy efficiency step.

While the issue of mercury in CFL bulbs must be recognized, I think that with proper care and handling -- and state and national leadership on CFL recycling programs -- compact fluorescent bulbs remain an import tool for energy conservation. People should remember to handle CFLs and any items with mercury (including some thermostats, button batteries, and even clothes irons) with care and properly dispose of them. It's important to remember that use of CFL's reduce mercury emissions from coal burning power plants and until other forms of lighting are economical and effective enough to replace the incandescent light, compact fluorescents can and should be continued to be used. So there's the scoop. A little care, and a touch of common sense and you can be sure to avoid the potential danger of mercury spilling from a broken CFL.