On Wednesday morning, March 2, 1983, a sewer line leaking from Animal Room 264, which had cattle infected with the Isfahan strain of vesicular stomatitis, spilled into the equipment room. Sludge splashed on Shine and two other building engineers taking their coffee break. Shine and another worker immediately placed plastic tape over the gushing pipe and flooded the floor area with hydrochloric acid.
Ten minutes after the crew's panicked phone call, safety officers Drs. Walker and Richmond barged into the equipment room and ordered the area locked down and decontaminated. The crew locked the corridor door and sealed it with duct tape on both sides. Food was incinerated, and clothes were stripped and stuffed into the steam autoclave. The workers mopped the corridor floor with Vanodine disinfectant solution and then poured a full-strength gallon of One-Stroke into the drain in Room 264. An hour later, a safety tech, wearing heavy rubber gloves and a full-face respirator, removed the duct tape and drained the trap into a bucket. Engineers located a small hole in the pipe, and Shine patched it up with silicone. The room was deconned a third time and finally declared clean late in the afternoon. After ninety-six hours of close monitoring, miraculously neither Shine nor the ten others exposed to the contaminated waste came down with any disease. Following biosafety rules to the T, it required seven and a half hours for the engineering and safety department to control a tiny pinhole in a pipe during Jerry Callis's administration, with far more efficiency and concern than the next regime would devote to a full biological meltdown.
After the meltdown, with no help from Plum Island and no diagnosis from his doctor, Shine turned to the one person who could help him recover — his wife, Fran. "My best doctor was my wife. She took all these books out of the local library, and threw away my meds." Fran put him on a strict regimen of exercise, good food, and positive thinking, and he slowly regained himself. To this very day, he has no idea what his illness was. A possibility is one of one of the feared "slow" viruses, so named not for the tempo of virus growth, but for the protracted time of the disease's course, which can be months or years.[47]
The laymen tried to figure out what they had contracted on Plum Island, and pleaded for answers from their North Fork doctors, family general practitioners better suited to bandaging knee scrapes and prescribing antibiotics for ear infections. "You are exposed to so many viruses over there," says Shine from experience. "They say it won't bother you, that the germs aren't zoonotic, that they won't transfer to you. Then you become ill, you tell your doctors you are ill, and that you work on Plum Island. And look here — they have no tests for you. Hepatitis they have a test for— but for Rift Valley fever? And USDA, their response to us always was, 'Prove it to us. Show us what you caught here and how you caught it.' Now how the hell I am supposed to do that?"
In a newspaper article that appeared the day after B Crew was commended for its "quick and decisive action" and then summarily fired, Plum Island officials stated there was never any danger to laboratory staff or to the public during the hurricane. Manuel Barbeito, an island safety officer, told Newsday, "There is no potential problem here…this is a safe facility," and stated that the laboratory air filters operated during the hurricane without power and prevented diseases from escaping. When Phillip, per his physician's instructions, asked for a list of what he was exposed to during the storm, an official handed him a letter. "It said the only things we were exposed to were paint, paint thinner, and oil — that's all." Apprised of the hurricane incident by Plum Island employees and worried local residents, Congressman George Hochbrueckner wrote a letter to the Department of Agriculture, demanding information on the storm's effects on the island's laboratories.
Though the government told the public nothing had happened, steps were being taken on Plum Island that reflected a different belief. A few days after the Newsday story, a portable generator the size of a tractor-trailer appeared alongside Lab 257. With the underground cable still shorted out, the portable generator provided the emergency power the lab had lacked for months, and covered the momentary power breaks when both the overheads and underground cable were restored. Though management claimed the biological containment system had worked properly through the hurricane, technicians replaced all of Lab 257's outside air dampers with new units. New procedures were adopted to regularly inspect the air dampers — which, according to the government, also worked properly when Hurricane Bob hit. Henceforth, after even a minor power interruption, employees said safety officers climbed atop Lab 257 to personally inspect the roof and ascertain that outside air dampers were closing properly. And just days before they were canned, B Crew was finally trained on how to use the face respirators. "They were afraid of lawsuits," guesses Shine, "so they did this to have it on record that we were all trained."
Today Shine and Fran spend their days working around the house, hustling firewood, and taking long walks along the beach, pointing out sea turtles and searching for washed-up fishing lures. Hurricane Bob, searing pain, and the recurring nightmares are now in the past. In his work cabin, out back behind his modest home, Shine keeps perhaps the world's largest collection of jigs and lures. Thousands of multicolored and feathered wooden, shiny metal, and plastic lures adorn the walls and ceilings of the dark brown cabin, warmed up in the winter by a small space heater. When he's not fishing with his two older brothers, Charlie and Eddie, aged eighty-six and eighty-one, he's hunched over the workbench fashioning the lures from broken ones found strewn on the beach. Shine's at his happiest hammering, sawing, gluing, and picking away at the rigs that will trick next season's blues and stripers into thinking they have fixed their mouths onto something delicious to eat — only to realize it'll be Shine, not the poor fish, doing all the eating.
Phillip still lives out on the east end, working for the county now, spending his free time on his beloved boat with his black Labrador, Jezebel. A few years ago, zyta contracted breast cancer, underwent extensive chemotherapy, and thankfully pulled through. The cancer survivor now works as a translator and was recently honored at a police department banquet for lending her bilingual skills to help solve a murder case that had gone unsolved for years.
THE BREEZE SUBSIDES
Dr. Roger Breeze left Plum Island in 1995 for a better career opportunity. His two predecessors had been honored by the ferryboats M. S. Shahan and J.J. Callis. "They won't need a boat to remember me by," Breeze told a Newsday reporter who asked him about his legacy. He was even more direct with me when we spoke. "My memorial has to do with the people I got there. I'm not interested in any damn boats and buildings. Facilities and boats don't do the research. People do. You can set out a stack of my scientific papers, and I'll be judged by those. I come back to this — it's the glory at all levels, and not in a negative kind of way."
47
AIDS and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD, the human variant of mad cow disease) are examples a of slow virus and a slow acting prion disease.