Back in Lab 257, Dr. Donald Morgan was working feverishly with his team testing the two hundred plus samples they had taken from the destroyed animals. When a virus is discovered, the strain isolated is often named after the location where it was found. Morgan named the virus "P.I.S.S.," for "Plum Island Sub Strain." The USDA chiefs in Washington went livid. A foot-and-mouth virus outbreak in the United States would prompt a worldwide ban on American meat imports, tank the agriculture sector, and wreck the economy. They ordered Plum Island to cease using "P.I.S.S." or the word "outbreak." Henceforth, the gregarious Morgan and his colleagues were only to use the phrase "The Incident." The USDA refused to admit its folly to the world. Dr. Morgan paid no mind and flagrantly violated the edict, dubbing it alternatively "The Outbreak" or his favorite, "The Disastrous Incident." Morgan's eight-year-old daughter Margaret evidently shared his sense of humor. Upon his return home after kill weekend, she greeted him at the door wearing a T-shirt he had given her. It read "Prevent Foot-and-Mouth Disease — Vaccinate Twice a Year." For the first time in days, a weary Morgan cracked a smile.
To this day, the official line from Washington, blindly echoed in papers from the Washington Post to the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, is that the last outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease virus in the United States occurred in 1929. However, it is clear that the last outbreak in the United States occurred on September 15, 1978 — on Plum Island.
September 1978 was to be the month of the grand opening of Dr. Cal-lis's newly renovated, state-of-the-art facility. Instead, it marked a low point of Plum Island and its director's storied career. By this time, the contractor had only finished "a rather small portion of the whole thing," said Callis. Barely halfway completed, the skeletal addition — amid all the dirt, piled-up materials, scaffolds, and equipment crowding the whitewashed Lab 101—looked and felt more like a war zone than a construction zone. Worse yet, it would soon fall under federal investigation for virus leaks and defective construction.
The contractors were working to extend Plum Island's scant laboratory space. In 1952, the USDA hadn't been able to build its desired facility, as Congress approved only one-third of their original request. They settled on just two buildings, and each lab wing could host one germ at a time due to the possibility of cross-contamination. Plum Island simply had too little lab space to study too many exotic foreign diseases emerging on the world scene.
The new state-of-the-art 70,000-square-foot addition to Lab 101 would include a third animal holding wing and associated research and autopsy laboratories; a vaccine plant capable of making 30 million doses a year (8,220 each day) and a refrigerated warehouse for virus storage; and a stylish entrance foyer in place of the menacing perimeter gatehouse. The additional space would bring the facility up to the size the USDA originally envisioned, enabling more research and more staff (adding 50 employees to the existing 330). More research meant more chances for scientific breakthroughs.
Or so they thought.
Over the next couple of weeks, Dr. Callis turned up the rhetoric on the * contractors. "We feel [the outbreak is] connected to construction or the changes in operating procedures that had to be made to accommodate the construction. We let people inside the compound wall [whom] we normally wouldn't have let in." Some were confused by his reasoning. Admitting construction workers inside the fenced compound could not, on its own, cause an outbreak, since all experiments were conducted inside the laboratory. Unless, of course, an agent escaped from the building into the outdoor compound. Or unless there was outdoor testing on Plum Island.
INVESTIGATION
Putting aside the serum samples from the animals in Building 21 and the Battery Steele holding pens, Dr. Morgan focused his investigation on the samples from Building 62. Of the animals killed in the outbreak, those in the middle pens, Nos. 5 and 6, had high antibody counts, while those in the side and end pens were low, indicating that the virus may have been walked in by an animal handler (lurking on his hands, or his sleeve, possibly) or brought in with the airflow current (if it had leaked from the laboratory construction site). The antibody counts indicated two to three cycles of disease. The virus had been multiplying and spreading for an entire week.
Ten days after the outbreak, Merlon Wiggin wrote a five-page memorandum titled "The Committee Dilemma." As chief of engineering and plant management, Wiggin was in charge of every function on Plum Island other than research: marine transportation, wastewater treatment, water supply, electricity, the emergency power plant, motor pool, metal shop, fire department, grounds crew, laundry, boiler plants, cafeteria, general maintenance, and biological containment. Second only to Director Callis, Wiggin oversaw nonresearch functions on the island and had twice as many people under his command. If the buck stopped with anyone other than Callis, it stopped with Merlon Wiggin. Hailing from a small town in Maine, Wiggin married his wife, Isabelle, just six months after he met her on a bus ride to nearby Portland. After working at Air Force bases, the thirty-year-old engineer with tousled brown hair applied for a position at Plum Island. Doc Shahan hired him while the facility was in its infancy, providing more than enough intricate mechanical projects and glitches to satisfy the young engineer.
Most disturbing in Wiggin's memo was his casual admission about the most dangerous part of the facility:
The Incinerator Area. Tests of this area show that hundreds of cubic feet of air a minute from a highly potential contaminated area have been escaping.
"Another area that comes to mind would be the exhaust air from the laboratory." Wiggin suggested testing the 107 filter units on the roof that trapped pathogens as air exited the building. "For nearly ten years, I have recommended that these filters be tested after each change (we have the equipment on hand to do it) and have also recommended that their efficiency be improved by replacement." He did not mention who exactly was preventing Wiggin, the chief of all plant management, from ordering a test inspection and replacement of the filters. Regardless of what an inspection of the air filters might yield, "It seems quite obvious the virus was transported by humans to the animals in Building 62," he wrote, which "seem[s] to rule out transmission by aerosol all the way from [Lab] 101." If indeed that was correct, it meant the biological safety measures were disregarded by an animal handler — a scientific staffer — and therefore not an employee in Wiggin's bailiwick.
Oddly, Wiggin ruled out the heavy construction going on on all four sides of Lab 101, particularly in the area of the incinerator. "We have carefully checked and tested other areas, such as the Contractor Sites, and have found nothing." This too, was in Wiggin's self-interest. He was the federal government's contracting officer and project liaison to Joseph Morton Company, the contractor. "I think we need to realize at least for the present our laboratory buildings are not perfect secure envelopes," he concluded. Despite that, shutting down was not in Plum Island's best interests. "I see little to gain and much to lose (monies, work, training, improvements, repairs, etc.) by delaying the return to normal operations…. "
Earlier in the day, the Lab 101 foreman, Truman Cook, and his men were busy spraying down the incinerator room with lye, even though he had been ordered the week before not to decontaminate or change any filters in the incinerator room until further notice; the investigation committee planned to inspect the area. After Wiggin learned Cook was deconning the area and attempting to change the old air filters, he told Cook to stop immediately.