That place is a powder keg." USDA and DHS told McKoy there would be no retaliation by his employer. Then they changed their tune and said government officials couldn't get involved in the affairs of a private contractor. The Plum Island contractor fired McKoy. The contractor said that the whistleblower had left his post without permission.
Chaos reined on both sides of the coin. Mark DePonte, in charge of Plum Island's water treatment plant on the eve of the strike, left a parting gift when he walked off the job: he shut down the complex water supply system, crucial to both fire suppression and biological decontamination. Then he sent DHS Secretary Tom Ridge an e-mail warning of "catastrophe" if the union workers did not return to their posts. Asked by a local reporter about the water crisis, DePonte said everything was fine when he left his post. "I can't help it if the new workers don't know which switches to turn on." After management spent hours figuring out the intricate maneuvers required to restore water, they called in the FBI, which began to investigate. Soon after, DePonte pleaded guilty to tampering with federal government property.[57]
Though the whole mess could have been averted with a forty-cent-per-hour wage increase for a total of $62,000 a year, the strike cost an additional $12.82 per worker per hour, or $45,000 per week — outrageous expenses passed along to, and essentially a strike shouldered by, the U.S. government and the taxpayers. "I am bewildered at why it had to get to this point," exclaimed Senator Hillary Clinton to the New York Times when asked about the strike. At the end of the year, Clinton demanded that the USDA cease operations at Plum Island until labor and biological safety lapses were rectified. And along with Republican congressman Rob Simmons from Connecticut, she formally requested that the Plum Island workforce be completely un-privatized and re-federalized. Unfortunately, their urgings fell upon deaf ears.
This is the state of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center.
Placing all employees at this germ-ridden utopia — if it is to continue its mission there — on the rolls of a well-trained Department of Homeland Security might prevent it from reaching this point again. It might ensure the safety and biological security of this troubled island laboratory. But this hasn't been done.
It goes without saying that Plum Island's transfer to DHS should be far more than a "paper transfer," as assistant director Santoyo put it. Above all, Plum Island needs something that's completely new in its long history: transparency. The past has proven, time and again, that the island's stewards cannot pilot the ship safely without close supervision. This secretive island has been exploited, both as a monarchical fiefdom and as a resume-building career stepping-stone. It should be neither. If Jerry Callis can be compared to a fallen angel, Roger Breeze can be likened to a vainglorious "doomsday machine," and privatization to an absentee slumlord.
Former Plum islander Phillip Piegari remembers a saying among the workers: "Plum Island is always taking calculated risks, and somehow they get away with it." The public must not allow the government to continue its research without being fully supervised, because it's running Plum Island like it's a game of Russian roulette — where its luck can only last so long.
The true story of Plum Island reaches a most disturbing conclusion. The laboratory once glorified as the "World's Safest Lab" is today the world's most dangerous.
In light of everything presented in these pages, consider these queries:
• Is such a facility necessary and important to the United States and its national security interests?
• Do the past catastrophes, the present level of safeguards, and its future plans justify the laboratory's existence on Plum Island?
Plum Island is a ticking biological time bomb. The U.S. Department of Agriculture set the timer, and the clock has been ticking away for years. Today the island is more vulnerable than ever before to a germ outbreak, and it remains wide open to sabotage and terrorist attack. Now is the time to reconsider its existence or take meaningful corrective measures. In other words, there's still some time to dismantle the bomb.
Or will the people of America have to wait until Plum Island reaches the point of no return?
The choice is ours.
Fallout: Current Affairs at Plum Island
Afterword to the Paperback Edition
t was an auspicious response. For the first time in more than two years, and the first time since September 11, 2001, a late-breaking media advisory went out from the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. A press tour would be held by the USDA and the Department of Homeland Security, on President's Day, of all dates. The New York Times showed up. So did Reuters and the Associated Press, NBC's Today show, Newsday, and New York City television and radio stations. I did too — after all, my book was the reason why everyone was there.
Reporters asked the Plum Island scientists, seated behind a makeshift dais, if their sudden openness had anything to do with the book Lab 257, scheduled for national release the following day. "No," they said. "Absolutely not. Now why would you think such a thing?"
Undeterred, those in the media treated to the quadrennial Plum Island dog and pony show asked the brass what they thought of the new book detailing the past half-century of their island laboratory. Two responses came forth: "What can I say?" a distinguished scientist rhetorically asked the Today show. "This goes to show you, you can't judge a book by its cover." And the other, "Sounds more like science fiction that fact." Off the record, they admitted a not-so-unimportant fact. When a reporter asked if any of them had read the book, all of them responded no, although one "skimmed" it. To this day, not one fact has been successfully challenged. So much then for scientific fact trumping "science fiction." Since then, Plum Island and its chorus of pseudo-scientific sycophants have called me a lot of things — except "wrong."
Standing on the side of the road in Orient Point that cold winter morning (now deemed a "security threat," I was refused access to the island), I held my own press conference. I appeared on national television and radio, and in print. The book made an appearance on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Asked to comment, New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton responded that she hadn't read the book yet, but it "appeared" to raise the "important issues of safety and security I've been raising for over a year." Hundreds of emails poured into my website from around the country, all concerned about this little known place that clearly had dangerous biological potential, a place targeted by a reputed terrorist. I attended many book sign-ings and book fairs, participated in panel discussions, and appeared on radio talk shows. I spoke to college students in their microbiology classes. Virtually everyone I encountered expressed outrage at a government laboratory in such patent disrepair that it posed a threat to us all.
Ordinary citizens responded by writing letters, like this one that appeared in the New York Times two weeks after the book's release, where the writer clearly felt I had not gone far enough:
"My agenda is not to close Plum Island, it's to make it safe," said Michael Christopher Carroll, author of "Lab 257," diluting his strong warnings. Why not move it?
What benefit is there from having deadly animal research two miles from such a heavily populated area, when birds and mosquitoes can easily travel that distance and beyond?
57
A union source says DePonte shut down the system because the line pump wasn't working properly, and that following procedure, he entered the shutdown into the logbook and recorded it on a dry-erase system status board in the power plant. Another worker familiar with the situation says it was shut down because from time to time the antiquated system — used in lieu of a recently installed replacement system — did not properly maintain the correct pH level. "This was standard procedure. The new system never worked, and management had it redesigned twice and it still didn't work right, so the old system is used." Failing to shut off the system, says the worker, would have caused the pH level to move in the opposite direction. "If [DePonte] left the water system running, they would have said he was trying to poison people." Why, then, did he plead guilty? "Dollars and cents, plain and simple," says the union source of DePonte's mounting legal fees, and calling the affair a "red herring," points to the fact that despite the extensive FBI investigation, DePonte retains his regulatory operator's license and is working at a municipal plant in Connecticut. "They could not troubleshoot it [after the strike] because they had no one capable of doing it, so they blamed someone. And they were looking for something they thought would turn the media against us — and it didn't work."