In a remarkable departure from the not too distant past, local newspapers provided glowing support. The RiverheadNews-Review, for example, commented: "Worthwhile research projects such as the Animal Disease Laboratory are in the best public interest and examples of useful expenditures of the taxpayers' money." Four years after the locals strenuously opposed the building of the laboratory, folks were now in genuine support. It didn't hurt that almost overnight, Plum Island became the largest employer in the region, with over three hundred workers making the ferry trip across Plum Gut each morning, all of them now receiving healthy federal government salaries and benefits. When the villagers' spouses, siblings, and children were hired by Plum Island, things quickly changed. "I think people are beginning to appreciate that we know how to maintain the security over any infection leaving the island," said Shahan, "and that a new industry has come to town and new money is being spent around here."
This was all a relief to Doc Shahan and Jerry Callis, who had fought hard to build the island laboratory. With the support of their mentor, Dr. Hagan, the scientists' vision was at first grandiose, perhaps too much so in Congress's eyes, as lawmakers in Washington parsed through the aggies' $30 million initial plan to build a thirty-acre behemoth. "These people came up before the committee," said the Appropriations Committee chairman, Jamie Whitten, "with the most fantastic plans for spending money and building a laboratory that you can imagine. It was entirely out of line…itlooked like the Department of Agriculture might…want a Pentagon building for itself." They ended up with a more modest, $10 million complex instead.
Laboratory 101 was a pioneer effort in high-hazard biological agent containment. On that day in 1956, it appeared as a gleaming white monument. Lying on the northwest plateau of Plum Island, the lab is splayed over a ten-acre site just east of the old lighthouse. A steep cliff, towering high above huge boulders, forms a natural buttress against the churning waters at the confluence of the Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. This 164,000-square-foot T-shaped structure, with all its intricate machinery — a cluster of twisting pipes and valves and boxes and gauges taking up the entire second floor — cost $7,712,000 to build. The USDA used the remainder of the $10 million in congressional funding for the supporting cast: the guardhouse entry gate, sewage decontamination building, emergency power plant, storage buildings, fencing to corral the herds of test animals outside, and the compound fences to envelop the lab building. The two ten-foot-high barbed-wire, chain-link fences have a twenty-foot buffer zone between them; the inner fence has a concrete barrier that extends five feet above ground and four feet below. Before 101 opened, the perimeter was scorched with chemicals to defoliate the area and deter vermin from approaching.
Just west of 101, outside the compound fence, is Building No. 102, the wastewater treatment plant. Here, sewage is heat-treated to decontaminate it before it is piped into the Long Island Sound and Gardiner's Bay. Next door is Building No. 103, the emergency power plant and adjacent oil tank farm. The air that comes in and goes out, the water coming in, the sewage going out — all of it is controlled inside a master control room with large, glowing red and green buttons and throw switches mounted on the walls, and large panel grids each containing thirty-five small boxes that illuminate white with buzzer alarms.
The top of 101's T is the clean zone — the main hallway and service area, offices, the sterilizing laundry, complete with sewing and mending equipment. The wide stem of the T is the hot zone, divided lengthwise into three segments. The two outer strips house thirty-two animal isolation rooms. Each room measures ten feet by fifteen feet, and a door, painted bright red, leads through change-room air locks into "hot corridors," dimly lit by squat windows made of opaque glass bricks that refract light and cast shadows within. Together, the animal isolation rooms hold up to seventy-five head of cattle.
The middle of the stem of the T, separated from the animal wings by an outdoor moat, holds a maze of laboratory rooms, divided into four research areas. Inside is all the heavy equipment — the electron microscope, ultraviolet irradiator, ultracentrifuge, egg incubators, virus fermenters, virus freezers, wall-to-wall glove boxes. The rooms are windowless, illuminated by fluorescent lights that cast a ghastly pallor over the glazed tile walls, cabinets, and metal benches upon which tissue cultures are grown, eggs embryonated, germs pipetted (sucked by mouth into a long glass tube), cells infected, antibodies produced, and so on. The big incubators don't hatch any chicks; they grow viruses in trays of eggs and provide embryo tissues for in vitro experiments. Inside the virus freezers are germs and a stockpile of animal and human tissues grown in the incubators alongside the chicken eggs. The ultracentrifuge spins to create a great force (thousands of times the Earth's gravitational force), which separates viruses from their infected host cell and other debris.
At the base of the T is the incinerator charging room, where animal carcasses, organs, fluids, paper items, and other combustibles — even spent nuclear radiation — are reduced to fine ash at earth-scorching temperatures. The smoke emitting from the pile within is flushed out through a filtered stack lined with afterburner jets.
During the dedication day tours, every inch of this state-of-the-art facility was sparkling clean, but this didn't last long. After the audience left and the stage and podium were broken down, the curtain fell on Plum Island. Days later, splattered blood, animal waste, and remnants of internal organs were strewn across the freshly painted white walls and shiny floors of the animal rooms, transforming them into something more akin to torture chambers than science labs. Behind one room's air-locked door, unsuspecting cows were restrained by a brawny animal handler wearing powder blue scrubs, then injected with a menu of germs that rendered the beasts incapacitated in a matter of hours. Inside another, goats were locked in stanchions, a hairsbreadth from choking between two narrow metal bars snapped tightly into place around their necks; another room held swarms of infected soft and hard ticks gorging on the blood of two pigs; and in still another, horses were bled for serum samples.
The fauna came to Plum Island in a precise and peculiar manner. Test animals were periodically trucked in from a Virginia farm to Brookhaven National Laboratory, the federal atomic energy research facility on Long Island. A special Plum Island truck picked them up and carted them to Orient Point, where the cattle car boarded the ferry for the bumpy ride across Plum Gut. Upon arrival at Plum Island harbor, workers led the animals off the truck and through the gated animal transfer station. The animals were slipped into a "squeeze-gate," punch-tagged on the ear, and sprayed. They were led up ramps onto another truck, a permanent fixture on the island, which brought the animals to the old Army artillery bunkers where they were washed in a big vat (called a dipping), then quarantined for two weeks. Feed came in through an air lock, and a hammermill that ground up any live insects or rodents that managed to burrow inside the burlap feed sacks. No person, vehicle, or animal could cross through the harbor gatehouse without a thorough decontamination.
After an animal finished its quarantine, it was a one-way trip into the lab. There, two animal handlers readied to enter the animal's room. Adhering to strict safety procedures, they donned protective gear — two-piece black rubber slickers, boots, rubber hats, and neon orange gloves — looking something like offshore fishermen preparing to be battered by a heavy gale. When they entered the room, one went to work tying the jaw of the cow to a cleat in the wall, while the other held it steady, petting the creature's coat. Then came the injection of anesthesia. Seconds later, the men jumped out of the way as the eight-hundred-pound cow suddenly keeled over on its side. Crouched over the supine cow, one handler yanked the animal's limp tongue out of its mouth, while the other stuck a long needle into the underside, and slowly injected the liquid virus slurry du jour. Their mission accomplished, the men exited, and took turns decontaminating, stepping into a boot bath of caustic soda lye and water and washing down each other's rubber uniform with a wire brush.