Up the ramp, at the head of the necropsy room's "disassembly line," stood veterinarian Donald Morgan, dressed in a white smock and skullcap, who closely inspected each cow marching toward him in a jagged line. He drew a blood sample and, donning rubber gloves and grabbing a scalpel from the knives and chisels laid out along the cutting table, clipped off some pieces of fleshy body tissue.
Two animal handlers then alternated kills with overdoses of anesthetics or a special gun that fired a lethal bolt of compressed air. Each animal was then hacked up with power saws and knives and disposed of. Big chunks of flesh were sent down the chute into the incinerator. The necropsy room was a muddle, strewn with blood and pieces of flesh. Inside, a cacophony of animal moans, groans, and squeals filled the air, along with saws buzzing and chains clanking, and the echoes of parts thumping down the chute. Animals were euthanized outside of the laboratory, too; there was simply not enough kill space inside Labs 257 and 101 to do all the killing. Those carcasses were carted into Lab 257 and sent up the cargo elevator to Dr. Morgan on the second floor.
Each time the room filled up, the phone rang in the incinerator charging room. "Okay, ready? Here it comes!" One floor above, two animal handlers chained up the hindlegs of each carcass and swung it over to the chute built into the floor. One lifted the steer's forelegs up over the lip of the chute while the other pushed it over. Then they lowered the chain over the winch and let it slide.
The incinerator area was considered the "hottest" area on the island, for the high levels of contamination and for the searing heat emitting from the furnace. Regular incinerator duty was grueling, exhausting work, the worst job on the whole line. Plant management crews took turns doing it and they loathed it. There were some interesting perquisites, however. For starters, there was a wide assortment of pornography piled high in the corner of the charging room. "You never had to worry about any women being in that room," says one worker. "And if a woman or a supervisor came in, you could always quickly toss the porn into the fire." The other perk strains credulity, had not multiple sources confirmed it. "On kill day, the guys upstairs would carve up steaks sometimes, put them in plastic bags, and toss them down the chute to us." From sirloins, to chicken breast cutlets, to pork chops — not USDA Grade A, but USDA Grade V (for virus riddled) — they were all broiled up in the incinerator wing kitchen. "Everyone, to a man, would deny it," says another employee. "But we did it — we ate the meat."
During the outbreak, it was without a doubt the most dangerous place to be, putting staff members at great risk. Down the chute came animal parts and cell cultures, teeming with germs, mixing together, floating around the charging room area, and then entering the fire pit. Normal laboratory operations called for "kill day" once every other week to dispose of test animals. This would be "kill weekend." Down the stainless steel chute came bloody animal parts of all shapes and sizes — legs, midsections, entrails — pouring into the wagon cart bin in the charging room. It was a macabre sight. Cattle, sheep, and horse heads rolled down the slide after their detached bodies.
Once the cart was full, the weary incinerator crew, dressed in bright red coats and skullcaps (to indicate the severity of contamination), chained it to a slaughterhouse hoist and ran the cart along a track to the other side of the charging room. There they opened the two black cast-iron sliding doors and were immediately blasted with heat from 2,000 degrees of oil-stoked fire raging seven feet below. "The smell and the heat were unbelievable," said one worker. "The closest thing to hell you've ever seen or felt." Each man grabbed a side of the cart and tilted it, dumping the cargo in. Flames immediately shot up from the nine-by-twelve-foot lake of fire. Burning fat and flesh popped and hissed. Sliding the hatch back into place, the charging room cooled a bit — down to 120 degrees Fahrenheit — and they watched the pyre grow higher and higher through the tiny thick glass porthole. When the flames retreated, workers dumped in more animal refuse, 1,500 pounds every hour, cartload after cartload. The roast lasted into the night and through the next day, for forty-eight consecutive hours, a period that far exceeded the design capacity specifications of the twenty-six-year-old oven. Some said the bricks ran so hot the eighty-four-foot-tall stack glowed red in the night sky like a molten beacon. Others recalled that the concrete wall of the incinerator cracked that weekend and had to be repaired. That Sunday evening, the crew pressure-washed the heaps of guts, excrement, and blood caked all over the charging room. One employee who was there describes the odor that came forth that night. "Imagine a roast beef left on high heat for eight hours, then left out rotting for eight more — it was a butcher shop gone wrong on the rainiest day."
The laboratories would need disinfecting with caustic soda lye, paraformaldehyde, and acetic acid. There was plenty of paraformaldehyde on hand, but only small amounts of the two other chemicals. Two tons of lye arrived within twenty-four hours on a barge. The safety officer ordered an employee to the mainland to buy up every last bottle of vinegar on the shelves in area supermarkets. Crews garbed in thick black rubber suits and fishing hats mopped the laboratory floors with acetic acid solution (using the vinegar), then scrubbed the yellow tile walls and ceilings. Over the next three days, the three outdoor animal holding pens were sprayed down with lye, as were the roads and walkways, the exteriors of all cattle trucks and cars (the insides were wiped down with the vinegar), and the administration buildings. Emergency crews wore protective suits to avoid chemical burns. Truckloads of manure were sprayed with lye and buried in a six-foot-deep trench covered with topsoil, which was also sprayed. Clothing was gassed with paraformaldehyde, and bales of hay, straw bedding, and animal feed burned in a colossal bonfire.
"The whole island was lyed, everything burned and died," says a decon team member. "Grass, trees, animals — all dead. The whole island was covered with ash. It looked like snow — all white." To complete the cleanup, Plum Island remained shut down on Monday. As the spray on the roadway was drying, the first ferry with returning employees pulled into Plum Island harbor at 8:00 a.m. Tuesday morning.
It took the incinerator over a week to cool down. Then workers carefully opened the crematory, crawled inside and shoveled the tons of ash and bone that had accumulated. Wearing flimsy paper masks and boots, they packed the ash into drums, topped them off with water and lye, and let them sit in the air lock for a day. The contaminated ash mixture was then emptied from the drums on the island grounds, and piled into large mounds.
After the lab chiefs left his office, Jerry Callis slumped into his office chair. How could this have happened? It seemed impossible, unthinkable even, and now he had to tell the whole world. This was the worst day of his scientific career. Well, it was a Friday. By the time they cobbled together a press release and distributed it late in the day, it would get buried in Saturday's newspapers. Weekends were the best times to leak bad news; people paid more attention to recreation than hard news. And the significance could be dampened further with the right word crafting.