"We had freezers thawing out all over the place. Puddles from freezers were going down floor drains," remembers Phillip. During a previous era, this accident would have been easily rectified. "We used to have this canister," says Shine, "a special single canister, and go to the outside tank and fill it up with liquid nitrogen. We would hook that canister up to the freezers and get the temperature down if we needed to." But now, no such luck. The portable canister was missing — it was removed from Lab 257 some time ago and never returned. Like emergency power and the safety respirators, the island was loaded with resources. And the workers had no way to use them.
All the men could do to counter the oozing biological freezers was mop up the puddles of liquid thaw into wastewater drains, keep the freezer doors shut, and pray for the storm to subside.
Sunday, August 18,12:30p.m. — A pungent odor began to permeate Lab 257. The doors leading into the "hot" areas — the 120-Area, the other lab rooms, and the animal rooms — are surrounded by rubber gaskets. The gaskets form a hermetic seal between contaminated air inside the hot rooms and clean air circulating throughout the rest of the building. An electric air compressor powers the gaskets; but since the power outage, the door gaskets were slowly deflating as air seeped out of them. While the freezer alarms continued screaming loudly through Lab 257, new buzzer alarms signaled a breach in the air-lock seals. Polluted air from within the lab and animal rooms began to mingle with clean air circulating through the rest of the building. "Walt Sinowski was after management for years and years," Phillip remembers, "to install an outside air compressor or an outside tank, in the event this might happen. You know, to prevent this type of thing."
With the door gaskets deflated, the rank odor of infected air wafted through the hallways. It flowed under the nostrils of healthy animals and the men of B Crew. The stench was even more potent near the animal rooms. Normally, the crew checks on the animals periodically by entering the animal wing and peering through the doors' thick glass windows, protected by the inflated gaskets. Entering the animal wing of Lab 257, the men were overcome by the smell of decaying, diseased animals. "We had this odor all over us," Phillip says. "It was just awful — it can't be described." The animals let out guttural wails and cries for help when they sensed the workers trying to check up on them. To top it off, a failed ventilation system contributed to the air-lock breach. "There was no venting over these animals, and the door gaskets were gone," recalls Phillip, who pauses and blankly stares into space with a look of disbelief. "On the floor there were animal droppings. There was urine. Everything was there to see, right there on the floor. We were breathing in all of this stuff." Shine concurs: "It was coming through the doors and ductwork and there was nothing to prevent it, nothing." The men were forced to turn back.
The men of B Crew were defenseless — with no means of protecting themselves, except to stay clear of the animal wing. Outside the building was no better, with a CAT-3 hurricane pummeling the island. "What could we possibly do?" Phillip asks, defeatedly. "We did everything we could to save this building." In the midst of the escalating calamity, crew members summoned the strength to remain levelheaded, at least on the outside.
A 1956 USDA film trumpeting Plum Island called the then-revolutionary negative air control system "an ingenious device" and a "wonder in itself." Because of this, "viruses stand no chance of getting out." Negative air can be best described as a series of supply and exhaust fans. One huge supply fan draws air from the outside, then circulates it through the building with a series of vents. At the other end of the building, a large exhaust fan expels the air through an enormous battery of air filters. A series of air dampers regulates the flow of air in and out of each contaminated room. Slightly adjusting a room's air dampers can throw the entire building out of balance; miscalibrate it and you can actually draw water out of a toilet. Lab 257's "hottest" room, the 120-Area, has the strongest negative air pressure, and the animal and other lab rooms share similar high-negative pressure. For this elaborate system to function properly, it requires two things: outside air vents to allow air to flow freely in and out of the building, and an electric current to turn the fan motors.
Sunday, August 18, 3:00 p.m. — Since their arrival at midnight, the crew had taken gauge readings every hour. The gauges monitor Lab 257's negative air pressure system, the foundation of the building's biological containment system. The dials are supposed to display the amount of negative air pressure in each lab room, like a speedometer measures speed. But the gauges inside Lab 257 were hit or miss. "Two-fifty-seven was a mess — it was always breaking down," says an employee familiar with the system. "An older-type gauge and a newer-type gauge measuring the same room would give two different numbers." Tapping the glass only made the gauge needles sway from side to side, before resting at a randomly inaccurate number.
When the power went down, the normal hum of the fans declined in pitch to a chopping noise that faded with each revolution until the fans ground to a halt. The needles on the monitoring dials began to fall. The twenty-four-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year containment system failed. With the negative pressure system off and the door gaskets blown, air particles escaped and traveled the path of least resistance, from contaminated areas to the outside.
The Army engineers who built Lab 257 came up with a fail-safe mechanism for such an emergency. The air vents that allow air in and out of the building were fitted with outside "air dampers." If the system failed, these air dampers were designed to close, locking "bad" air inside the lab. But like so many other controls on the night of Hurricane Bob, the outside dampers faltered. "They were frozen in an open position — and we couldn't move them," says Shine. Given the USDA's abysmal record on Plum Island safety, they weren't checked periodically or adequately maintained. The strong hurricane winds might have broken them off or simply prevented them from closing. Biological containment was completely jeopardized.
The men, realizing with horror that containment was entirely lost, rubbed their eyes in disbelief. "There were insects in the building — we saw them," Phillip recalls with a pained expression. With the system down, airborne insects — mosquitoes, flies, moths, all in abundance on the feral island — burrowed through the air vents into the laboratory building to escape the storm. Inside, the insects mingled with disease animals, spoiled air, and contaminated raw sewage. They flew freely in and out of the building during and after the hurricane.
"We had no power — there's no on-site generator at 257. They had everything we needed, everything in 103 [the emergency power plant]. We had our incinerator, our own boilers — and" — Shine's voice is trembling, and the husky engineer is choked up probing the memories—"give us something, an old pump outside, even a lawn mower engine. Something— something for us to help — ya know?"
Phillip interrupts to cool him down. "Look, I'm not a scientist, but…" he confesses, head in his hands. Advanced degree or not, Phillip can relate what he saw, what he heard and smelled, how he felt. And he knows in his heart and in his head it wasn't good.
"… to me, it was a biological meltdown."