How does Plum Island get away with it time and again, and for so long? For one, as mentioned earlier, until 1991 Plum Island was an extremely close-knit family of workers, hailing from a band of sleepy colonial-era villages that preferred tranquillity to making trouble. "Loose lips sink ships," went the philosophy. Another reason lies with its harmless-sounding, and patently misleading, name: "The Plum Island Animal Disease Center." The 1999 West Nile virus outbreak and the 2001 anthrax attacks showed the public that humans caught animal diseases, too — and died from them. The USDA presented a formidable barrier of secrecy that newspaper and television reporters — all with ephemeral attention spans — could never fully cross. Whenever its culpability was called into question — which was more often than not — the USDA could always hide behind its shield of government secrecy and national security, no matter how insecure its facilities were. Finally, and perhaps most important, as its own island it enjoys total freedom, and no public accountability. A arm of the federal government, Plum Island has no constituents, or media, or shareholders to report to. And short of a congressional law or presidential executive order, no one can stop it.
The USDA fancies calling Plum Island "The Alcatraz of Animal Disease." This is terribly misleading. Unlike the prisoners of Alcatraz, live germs on Plum Island have made it out alive on two proven occasions, from each of the island's two laboratory buildings. And those are the known outbreaks; many more no doubt escaped detection. Employees have been infected with animal germs, and some have become violently and permanently ill. The USDA prefers to shrug its shoulders and demand impossible proof. Plum Island has proven to be an environmental catastrophe and a workplace safety nightmare, chronicled on multiple occasions by its own sister government agencies, the EPA and OSHA. Given the direct facts and circumstantial evidence, the insidious connections between Plum Island and the initial outbreaks of three infectious diseases — West Nile fever in 1999, Lyme disease in 1975, and Dutch duck plague in 1967—are far too coincidental to be dismissed. Liaisons between Plum Island and a top Nazi germ warfare scientist smuggled into the United States under a top-secret military program add a new slate of questions to the already murky formative years of joint USDA-Army biological warfare activities there. The most burning revelations lie in the consistently ineffective biological security measures, which let unknown viruses and bacteria find their way through supposed decontamination filters and systems and into the air and local waters to this day.
All of this should be terrifying science fiction, but it's worse. Because it's all real.
Clearly, Plum Island is no CDC or Fort Detrick. Except in one important way. Plum Island — funded and run more like a small town high school biology lab than a high-containment virus laboratory — works on germs as deadly as the other two: microbes that cause AIDS, Rift Valley fever, polio, West Nile fever, Japanese encephalitis, swine flu, mad cow disease, to name a few, and countless others in Plum Island freezers (not to mention anthrax).
Looking at the 1956 vintage Lab 101 in full operation, and viewing Plum Island's past to see its future, one thing is clear. Alcatraz is indeed a misleading comparison.
Where and why did it go wrong? Money. Power. Duplicity. Politics. Glory. All had a hand in shaping this twisted animal kingdom. Political support for Plum Island ran from nonexistent to hotly antagonistic to almost laughable. From U.S. Senators Ives and Lehman's 1952 desire for public hearings on the lab's location, to a local congressman's plea to choose an island elsewhere, to Congressman Forbes's 1995 successful fight to halt the controversial BSL-4 upgrade— federal officials have viewed Plum Island as a pariah. Other than nuclear waste depots, Plum Island may be the only federal facility in America where locally elected federal officials flatly refuse to lend any support. Other facilities, like the nearby Groton nuclear submarine base, just across the Long Island Sound in Connecticut, can count on support from their congressmen and senators because of their boost to the local economies and the steady jobs they provide. Not so on Plum Island, where officials vacillate between investigating it (or pretending to) and ignoring it. The community never wanted the laboratory there to begin with, and though many locals — whose sons and daughters and brothers and sisters worked there— buried the proverbial hatchet, the politicians kept theirs in an easy-to-reach place. Had the USDA and Army established their labs in locales where the community and its political leadership actually supported it, like Maine, or Montana, or Washington State, or on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, it would have been different. But they didn't. They plunked a biological warfare lab down in a populated region that begged them, "Please. Don't put it here. Not in my backyard." Right on the edge of the largest population center in the United States.
When the Army left in 1954, it took its deep pockets and congressional war-hawk caucus with it. Left with no funding from the military complex and zero political support, Plum Island found itself, literally and metaphorically, out at sea, forever swimming in the red with never enough money to meet its skeletal budget. It became a forgotten orphan in an obscure research division of a federal agency that had its priorities — and political supporters— based far away from New York, nestled deep within the farmbelt. Contrast this with the Ames federal laboratory (the USDA's domestic disease version of Plum Island), always championed by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, who also happens to be the ranking Democrat on the Senate's Agriculture Committee. During its half-century of existence, Plum Island has never had a Tom Harkin. But it sorely needed one.
Plum Island endures a vicious cycle of bottom-of-the-barrel annual appropriations that leads to decisions that cut corners and sacrifice safety and security. In the 1970s and 1980s, Plum Island's engineering and plant management department cited "insufficient personnel" as the prime reason for its lack of preventative maintenance, proper training, and multiple containment leaks riddling Lab 101's roof. In the 1990s, the private contractor Burns & Roe cited financial woes when it refused to staff the sewage decontamination plant twenty-four hours a day, even after a massive toxic spill occurred. Funding issues at Plum Island have not only impaired its performance, but have adversely affected the island's dated, crumbling infrastructure as well.
These types of priority decisions — untenable choices between science and biological safety — made each year on Plum Island are never forced onto Fort Detrick or CDC. The CDC received approximately $2 billion from Congress in 1998. In that year, the Fort Detrick laboratories received $25 million and millions more in in-kind support from the Army. Plum Island skimped by on about $12 million. It appears that the 2004 Plum Island budget, now under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), will be approximately $16 million. Do animal and zoonotic science and health just not rate? Is it poorly understood or not explained well enough, compared to purely human health priorities? Is there no recognition of the susceptibility of humans to animal diseases accidentally or intentionally released on the population?