Maintaining proper biological security also means screening scientists and workers. In the early days, Dr. Callis defended the security checks and taking oaths before researchers were hired, telling a panel, "We wouldn't want anybody working here who would maliciously sabotage our work." But over the years Plum Island has welcomed many foreign scientists in residence with little or no background checks, from nations like China, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Uganda, and — of all places — Iraq. While doctors from staunch American allies like Japan and Taiwan should be, and are, welcomed to Plum Island, those hailing from nations with suspect political affiliations ought to be barred. "A highly skilled individual could take advantage of the opportunity afforded by a position of trust in a laboratory…in human or veterinary medicine. Such persons would use to full advantage the appearance of loyalty and transparent honesty," Canadian officials wrote this in December 1941 at a time of world turmoil. It rings just as meaningfully today.
Background checks should be run, like they were in the 1950s, on all nonprofessional personnel as well — yet another discarded procedure. Recently, a worker in charge of preparing Plum Island identification badges was caught making fake badges and was quietly dismissed. Dr. Carol House speaks of a USDA employee who was accused of taking large bribes at the Port of Miami quarantine facility, and was previously convicted for assault and battery. The employee was transferred to work at Plum Island. House noticed the man, an inventory keeper, on Plum Island on a Saturday morning, for no apparent reason. "I'm thinking to myself, 'This is weird— what's he doing here on a Saturday?' He knows where all the keys are, and knows all the combinations to the locks." On Monday morning, House privately reported her observation to security, who never properly investigated the claim. What had he been doing there that day? "I don't know," says House. "I wasn't going to trail him. I went home earlier in the day and he stayed on after that." The man mysteriously left Plum Island about two months later. "This was the mentality of security," House recalls. Bungle it, or honor it in the breach.
A final concern involves Plum Island's airspace. At some point during the gradual decline of the island's security, the restricted "no-fly zone" designation over Plum Island's airspace was suspended. Its airspace should be redesignated restricted on navigational flight charts and enforced by the U.S. Air Force or the National Guard.
Privatization—A democratic government should perform essential functions that are economically and practically infeasible for private citizens and industry to perform themselves. For example, maintaining a private armed security force to guard one's home is economically beyond most people's reach, so everyone pays taxes to support a municipal police force that guards one's person and property. Applied to Plum Island, research on exotic animal disease has been deemed inefficient and impractical for the private sector to finance, so it has been delegated to government. Because of the ultrasensitive nature of operations, its support workers should be of the highest caliber. Skill — not a willingness to work for low wages and benefits — should drive recruitment. Safety and security — not year-end profits realized on a balance sheet — should be the primary motivator. This is not an indictment of the private sector; it is a realization that government takes on inefficient roles to provide a necessary benefit and protect its citizens. Plum Island, like airport security, must be federalized.
A stark reminder of this occurred at midnight on August 13, 2002, when seventy-six workers, with a combined 758 years of professional experience running Plum Island, went on strike for the first time in the island's history. Citing living wages and medical benefits that lag behind similar operations elsewhere, Local 30, the Plum Island union, took action after going without a contract for eleven months.[56] The union asked for a forty cents per hour per worker increase, or $850 per worker. The private contractor rejected their modest demands, and instead airlifted some forty replacement workers ("scabs" in union parlance) from as far away as Colorado to Connecticut, and secretly ferried them to Plum Island under cover of night. The replacements circumvented the twenty-four-hour picket line at the Orient Point dock — christened with a camping tent, a twenty-foot-high inflatable balloon rat, and an American flag. The scabs were taking turns working the island's critical systems and sleeping on cots huddled together in the big warehouse at Plum Island harbor. Food and toiletries were ferried in for them.
Responding to concerns over whether Plum Island could be safely run during a walkout by the workers trained to sustain it, a USDA spokeswoman said simply, "We do not feel it is necessary to shut down the island." But the replacement workers' mishaps contributed to Plum Island's circus-gone-wrong atmosphere. Scabs caused three separate ferryboat incidents: one in which the ferry ran over a buoy in Plum Gut, causing $10,000 in damage; another where the boat crashed into the Old Saybrook, Connecticut, dock; and yet another in which a six-hundred-gallon tank of liquid nitrogen fell off the back of the boat into Plum Island Harbor. Thankfully the tank did not rupture, but the parade of horribles marched on. One worker, placed in charge of the laboratory's critical negative air containment system, had been previously charged with malicious assault on three occasions. The man went missing for three days, taking with him a laptop computer which remotely controlled the laboratory's biological containment system by dial-up access. Seven hundred gallons of oil spilled near the power plant (on the same site of a 1,500-gallon spill in 2000), 200 of which seeped into the ground. Two replacement workers drove off with a 2002 Dodge Caravan assigned for local errands and never returned. Later found in New York City, the minivan's cargo was unknown. OSHA returned, again, to Plum Island and cited the contractor for at least six workplace safety violations, including repeat infractions all too familiar now: poor handling of hazardous materials, inadequate training in blood-borne pathogens, and no radiation hazard training. At this writing, a second laptop computer is missing from inside the biological containment area, one that according to sources contains laboratory experiment data. The DHS is investigating yet another sensitive computer believed to be stolen. And in yet another instance of history repeating itself on Plum Island, there were two power outages, each multiple hours long, in December 2002. The emergency power generators failed, and the ever-vigilant Plum Island safety office attempted to seal containment doors with ordinary duct tape to keep germs from escaping. Although three employees were marooned inside biological containment areas until power could be restored, one scientist referred to the tape-up job as "standard operating procedure."
On Plum Island, speaking out was forbidden after the strike. Worker Jim McKoy came forward and told USDA and DHS officials about lax safety and security procedures. He told them that he saw employees working with asbestos without proper protections; that he saw visitors walking around and about Plum Island unescorted; and that he exchanged ID badges with another worker as a test of the security system. The ID switch, he said, went unnoticed for a whole day. "I really felt I had to do something," McKoy told a local newspaper. "I could go anywhere in the lab….
56
The earlier 1998 contract that expired was only agreed to after a federal mediator was brought in to resolve a threatened strike. The contractor agreed to 3-percent-per-year wage increases, slightly lower than U.S. inflation increases over the same period.