One of the most insightful analyses of ways to defend against agroter-rorism comes from Anne Kohnen, who designed specific recommendations in her October 2000 Harvard master's degree thesis. Kohnen proposed a four-level counterattack, from the organism level to the farm, sector, and national levels. The report requires Plum Island be upgraded to BSL-4 to combat all exotic animal diseases. When asked about the impact of her the-sis — which is perhaps the most comprehensive report publicly available on the subject — Kohnen, who now works on nuclear proliferation, laments the inattention agroterrorism still receives. "Until now, it has been overlooked. Not of much interest to the policymakers — it's not a sexy topic like arms control or international trade. It hasn't received much press. But I don't think that's a bad thing — I'd just as soon have fewer articles out there about how easy it is." Gary Stubblefield takes the opposite approach. "I don't like putting these things out in the news. But sometimes it doesn't hurt to advertise that we are working on things." Speaking of our homeland security, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry said on Meet the Press that there are "enormous gaps and deficits in the preparedness level… " Given the lack of preparedness, federal and state officials need to work much harder.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks on America, homeland security has become paramount to the nation's survival. Plum Island can play an important role in securing the home front. But not the Plum Island that exists today.
There are two worthy options for the island's future: closure or total rebirth. In 1983, the National Academy of Sciences implored the USDA to close Plum Island down, eight years before it was foolishly privatized. "Limitations of time and budgets, shortage or lack of primary containment equipment, and lack of a sufficient number of engineering and safety staff trained in biomedical containment facilities have made it difficult… " Had the public known of this report, the shop would have long been closed. But they hadn't, and Plum Island still limps along, plagued by those same limitations and shortages. Plum Island management is asleep at the wheel, waiting to be jolted awake by an employee dying from contact with deadly exotic animal virus, or by a scientist burning in a laboratory fire the volunteer bucket brigade couldn't put out because the emergency exit door was locked, or by large numbers of swimmers in the Hamptons coming down with strange untraceable illnesses, or a boater in the Long Island Sound hooking a box full of test tubes.
The second possibility, a born-again Plum Island, must take strict measures in biological safety and biological security, truly separate matters that are too often confused. Science, security, and safety must go hand in hand and rate equally; never should one be sacrificed for another. Should there be an imbalance, it must tip in favor of security and safety, and rather than the pursuit of science.
In this end, a "Plum Island Prescription" follows:
Biological Safety—It begins with the transportation of virus and bacteria samples to Plum Island. When the USDA convinced Congress to let it transfer viruses over the mainland in the late 1950s, it duped the lawmakers by saying there would be only a few trips a year. That wasn't true then and it's not true today, as samples make their way anonymously along highways and local roads multiple times each day. Dr. Callis used a USDA courier to transport samples, saying, "We do not trust the mails." Today, Plum Island is far more trusting, entrusting germ samples to the U.S. Postal Service, airport limousines, and private shipping companies like Federal Express. Drivers don't know their packages' contents, nor are they trained on handling an accidental spill.
The USDA's private courier is marginally better. The precious cargo is placed in the trunk of a compact car or in the backseat of a Dodge Caravan minivan, and an unarmed driver takes it for a two-hour spin from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Plum Island. Nothing will break in the sturdy containers if dropped from heights of up to twenty-seven feet. Physics dictate, however, that a dropped box from that height will be traveling at 29 miles per hour upon ground impact. A 60 mph car crash will subject the same box to twice the force. That's far from unbreakable.
Virus shipments should arrive either by the original method of Navy ship transport or by armed escort over New York City and Long Island roads. In this case, notification of each trip must be given to emergency responders like fire and police departments, along with the nature of the samples and what to do in case of an accident (including a fatal one, like the deadly accident in 1970 involving the Plum Island germ courier).
It should go without saying that biological samples should brought immediately to Plum Island and locked away in storage and never be left on the side of Route 25 or in the Plum Island mailbox. At 7:05 p.m. on May 19, 2002, Southold town police received a worried call from the Orient Point private security guard. Someone had placed a suspicious-looking package inside the oversized black Plum Island mailbox along Route 25. The road was cordoned off, and 350 passengers on two Connecticut ferries were detained on the boats for more than three hours. The police called in the Suffolk County emergency services unit, who donned protective gear to rip open the mailbox and expose its contents. "After this examination," said the police report, "the items found in the mailbox were determined not to be of suspicious nature." The package was an envelope containing junk mail. Had it not been a false alarm, a three-hour response such as this would have posed tragic consequences.
The Plum Island safety office needs to be taken seriously and augmented with seasoned professionals, returning to the policy that the director of safety is a trained scientist. The Plum Island frying pan affair clearly demonstrates this. As part of a 1993 renovation of sixty thousand square feet in Lab 101, the windows needed to be replaced. The entire wing was opened to the atmosphere for the first time since 1956. The safety department hatched a jerry-rigged decontamination operation using two hundred electric frying pans, three hundred power extension cords, eighty rolls of duct tape, and a bunch of household fans. With frying pans placed on the floor every few feet, the safety office heated eighteen-gram blocks of solid formaldehyde to 450 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour, turning the solids into a poisonous decontaminating gas. When the cloud dissipated days later, they would collect 600 test strips of the Bacillus subtilis spore, a germ known for its hardiness (the same germ used in Fort Detrick's germ warfare tests in the New York City subway), to see if the formaldehyde had fully decontaminated the area. Climbing into the air lock and collecting the test strips, workers in space suits found that more than 120 of the strips turned murky with bacteria spores. The decontamination failed. On the second try, poisonous gaseous formaldehyde, in concentrations far greater than those that sickened Fran Demorest, leaked into the adjacent lab and forced a full evacuation to the Army chapel. Again, Plum Island escaped the reaper — no one was seriously injured.
What caused this potentially deadly leak? It was something that plagued Labs 257 and 101 often in the past, particularly during Hurricane Bob. On the day of the second try, a power outage just after 7:30 a.m. shorted out the negative airflow system and stopped the forward airflow. Soon after, thirty unsuspecting people working in the laboratory smelled a pungent odor, and their eyes began to tear. No viruses escaped, the USDA said. Just formaldehyde gas.[55] The USDA blamed it on the Long Island Power Company, which in turn blamed it on an osprey that crashed into a power line, disrupting the power running through the undersea cable to Plum Island. Neither mentioned why the emergency generators at the power plant failed to kick in. The same people that cooked up the frying-pan fiasco still run the skeletal Plum Island safety office. This critical department, arguably the most important on the island, must be staffed with a multitude of professional experts, rather than a handful of McGyver-like handymen solving biological problems with pots and pans.
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In an amusing aside, this only-on-Plum Island disaster occurred the same day the battered Dr. Jerry Crawford announced his departure. One can picture Crawford, packing up his desk, breathing a long sigh of relief.