Lab 257
THE DISTURBING GOVERNMENT‘S SECRET STORY OF THE
GERM LABORATORY
BY MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER CARROLL
10
THE DISTURBING GOVERNMENT‘S SECRET STORY OF THE
GERM LABORATORY
BY MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER CARROLL
10
The Kingdom and the Glory
Roger Breeze wanted to be a vet because the local veterinarian was
the most successful person who came by his family’s sixty-acre
dairy farm in the north of England. The Breezes milked cows and
raised chickens in the 1950s. They delivered creamy milk each morning to their customers’ doors, along with fresh eggs and chickens, eking out a
living by profiting on both production and delivery.
Roger’s idea was to follow in that country vet’s footsteps. When he was
seventeen, he attended vet school at the University of Glasgow in nearby
Scotland, one of the oldest universities in the world. Though it wasn’t his
original plan, upon graduation he was given the coveted opportunity to
teach at Glasgow. It was a prestigious appointment he couldn’t turn down.
To help make ends meet, he opened a local vet practice and worked nights
and weekends. “I had some crazy nights,” Breeze told Outside magazine:
Once I had just finished pulling a newborn pig that was stuck in its
mother’s womb when I get another call about a sick dog. I go right
over, knock on the door, and a bunch of Hell’s Angels answer.
They’re all looking at me kind of funny, but I’m too worn out to
care. I examine the dog and see right away that it’s too far gone with
distemper. So I take that dog out back and shoot it. The bikers pay
me my fee, but they’re staring at me wide-eyed, like I’m some kind of
lunatic. It’s not until I’m back in my car looking at myself in the
rearview mirror that I see that my face and hair are all blotched and
matted with pig placenta. I looked like the psycho vet from hell.
Two years into his professorship Breeze emigrated to America—a bold
and unconventional move. He saw that young go-getters like himself, no
matter how bright they were or how hard they worked, would be shunted
into Glasgow’s faculty caste system. There were eighteen veterinary pathology positions in all of Britain, and a slow thirty-two-lockstep ladder of
advancement. Every professor parked on the same step was paid the same
meager salary. “It didn’t matter whether you taught Sanskrit or law,” he
remembers. “ ‘As long as there is still death, there’s hope,’ we used to say.”
Roger Breeze disliked the stuffy peerage. What does your father do? Who
do you know? What high school did you attend? No one seemed to care about
what was really important—one’s talent and ability to perform. “Can you
imagine people in America asking, ‘Where did he go to high school?’ ” Breeze
asks. “How the hell would anybody know where to look, let alone care?”
The religious discrimination also bothered him. Once a man “of great
power” at Glasgow asked him to return to his alma mater to teach a discipline
he didn’t know. When Breeze explained his lack of knowledge in the discipline, the man said it didn’t matter, saying, “There are too many English
Catholics up here teaching and we need more Scottish Protestants.” Ironically, Breeze was neither a Scot nor a Protestant—but with his University of
Glasgow pedigree, they assumed he was.
All those stodgy trappings—and the royal mahogany paneling and leather furniture—never aroused him. No one in America cared what the
laboratory lobby looked like and what the scientists’ last names were, so
long as they produced great science. In America, Breeze was more at home
than he ever was in Britain. “Here it’s ‘On with the job!’ That’s what I like.”
THE BREEZE REIGN
For all but a few of today’s scientists, it’s not about the money. It doesn’t
matter if you earn a million per year if five years down the road you are less
employable than you were when you started. It’s about science, but also,
apparently, the glory. “They all want the glory,” Breeze asserts. “That’s
what the whole thing is sold on today, and as director, your job is to provide that.” To reach scientific brilliance, you need the proper tools, and that
means expensive equipment. Most scientists do not question their ability;
what they do question is whether a potential employer can offer the equipment and support they need.
Dr. Breeze’s theory, honed in his first career post in the New World,
went like this: institutions like Yale and Columbia, because of their reputations, have no problem recruiting postdoctorates for their three-year
apprenticeships with lab chiefs. In this regard, America was little different
from the Old World. Elsewhere down the ladder of prestige, that isn’t quite
the case; competition is fierce among the rest, and to prevail, a lab director
must deliver the resources.
In 1984, after just a few years on United States soil, Dr. Breeze rose to
chairman of the microbiology department at the Washington State University vet school, where he oversaw twenty-five faculty members. The school
had a unique approach to its faculty recruitment that fit well with Breeze’s
management style. “It was a very entrepreneurial university,” he recalls.
“You could walk into the president’s office and tell him you had a problem
and you could cut a deal.” He could reduce a salary or eliminate a position
altogether and use those funds to buy an electron microscope for a star faculty member. Utilizing this flexibility, Dr. Breeze built the best department
of its kind in the nation. In the mid-1980s, however, a new provost arrived.
Out went the freewheeling philosophy. Now, over half of Breeze’s powerhouse faculty was being courted by rival universities and bombarded with
lucrative job offers.
On a cold January morning Breeze went to the provost’s office to plead
his case. “Listen,” he said in his deep Scottish-sounding brogue. “You have
to give us the flexibility we once had—please—or we’re going to lose our
people!” The provost leaned over his desk and lectured his spunky department chair. “Roger, you need to understand something. WSU is never going
to be a great university. We’re going to be a place where people pass through
to achieve their best elsewhere. You’ve done a fantastic job developing these people—really you have—but you’ll have to accept that.” Breeze could
hardly believe his ears. What the provost was really saying was that there’s a
cap on one’s success, that one could go no further. And in America, no less!
“I told him, ‘I have never heard so much bullshit in all my life.’ ”
Breeze turned and walked out of the provost’s office, feeling like he was
back at Glasgow. He trudged back to his campus office, darting between
waist-deep snowdrifts. He spied an orange slip of paper on the windshield
of his car parked out in front of the quaint brick vet school building. “What
the hell is this?” he yelled out. It was a $10 parking violation: Parking Without a Permit. “When it snowed,” recalls Breeze, “they only brushed off the
windshield on the driver’s side looking for the permit.” His parking permit
had slid to the other side of the dashboard.
The ticket was enough to push Breeze over the edge. “I absolutely
became unglued.” Breeze stormed up to his office and resigned his chair.
Previously, the USDA had asked him to run the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. He had responded by asking, “Are you crazy?” The gig came
with a $20,000 pay cut, made worse by a cross-country move and a huge
cost-of-living increase. Now he was the crazy one. Breeze renounced his
British citizenship, pledged allegiance to the United States, and cast his lot
with Plum Island, an island monarchy all his own. To Breeze, unless one’s
science was “the very best in the field,” one’s career was finished. He left
WSU, taking with him the “entrepreneurial style” he perfected there.
“The whole management style I have is this—you have to go in, not
just with money, but with resources.” He could help the USDA deliver
those resources at Plum Island. Or, as one familiar with Breeze puts it, “He
could go up there and kick some ass.”
When Roger Breeze arrived, he found Plum Island’s laboratories “literally falling into the sea.” Turning Plum Island into a gleaming new facility
would take a tremendous financial effort, and money was unavailable.
“Nobody said to me, ‘Come to Plum Island and we’ll pour money into
it. . . . ’ Washington thought the money they poured in gave them more of
the same—the same science that wasn’t good enough.” The goal then would
be to take Plum Island’s small budget and stretch it as far as possible, to lure
the best scientists with new lab equipment, and keep them happy once they
arrived. “I told [USDA headquarters] we either have to do it this way or
recruit only Czechs, because this place looks like Prague in 1956 and they’ll
feel right at home here.” Meanwhile, the National Academy of Sciences,
having excoriated Plum Island, said it couldn’t be fixed and urged it be
closed down. While Breeze spoke persuasively to the skeptics about how
the island would turn around, privately he harbored doubts. He knew all
eyes were on him, looking for his tenure to end in disaster. His first failure
could very well be his last.
Taking over the Plum Island kingdom, Roger Breeze had put himself
up against the proverbial wall. He had some snake oil to sell. The question
was, could he sell it?
The first thing Breeze’s “science first for glory” regime did was tear
apart Plum Island’s budget. Since the Army had left Plum Island in 1954,
ongoing funding problems were par for the course. Dismayed over early
cuts in his budget, Doc Shahan said, “The project may stand or fall,
depending on adequate support in the beginning.... [USDA] cannot properly discharge its responsibilities without such a facility as Plum Island
which is at present only an infant facing gargantuan tasks.”
When Dr. Callis first took the reins in the 1960s, he too felt the money
crunch: “For the last several years, the salaries of wage board employees have
increased annually... [but] our budget has not been increased by an amount
equivalent. . . .” And in the 1980s, Dr. Shope’s advisory board proposed Plum
Island prepare two budgets—one outlining the costs of a mainland laboratory, and another showing the additional costs of operating a facility on an
island, in an effort to sway Congress into properly funding Plum Island. This
way, Congress could understand why it had to fork over such large chunks of
money to support functions as compared to research. Without the necessary
funds, said the advisers, Plum’s mission could be “jeopardized.”
To raise Plum Island from its depths, Breeze first focused on where the
money was going. For this, he needed a crack accountant, a brilliant numbers
guy. Enter John Patrick Boyle, known as one of the best number crunchers in
the business. An Irishman of medium build, with a frosty white beard, Boyle
in his heavy Boston accent recalls Breeze’s offer: “ ‘You’ll have to build it up
from nothing, John,’ he said to me. ‘It presents a real challenge.’ ” As they discussed the opportunity, something about the Scot (though he was really a
north-Englishman, everyone thought him a Scot) captivated Boyle. He saw
in Breeze a rarity in government service—a visionary with an ambitious plan,
backed up with the enthusiasm and an uncanny relentless drive to carry it
through. Boyle signed on.
Boyle’s first visit to Plum Island was like something out of an episode
of The Twilight Zone—to him, it was an eerie isle that time forgot. The
once impeccably groomed and abundantly flowering “plantation” was now
a wildly overgrown jungle. Paint had chipped off Lab 101’s walls and huge
chunks barely clinging on were flapping in the ocean winds. “Scientists
were just sitting around doing nothing.” Or at least Boyle thought they
were scientists. “You couldn’t tell the difference between a scientist, a tech,
or the guy who swept the floor.” The place had gone to pot—it was filthy
and carried a rank, musty smell. The floors, caked with stains, hadn’t been
mopped in ages. On laboratory bench tops, which required an ultra sterile
surface for virus research, Boyle spied dried soda pop, crumbs, and papers strewn about in piles. He took his index finger and swiped it along a pipe
that ran along the wall, removing a quarter-inch layer of dust. “It was just
ugly,” says Boyle. “And everyone had the same attitude—‘fuck it.’ ”
Plum Island was also a mess in other ways, especially when seen through
the assiduously burning eyes of an accountant. “There was a lot of what we
call indirect research cost [IRC],” remembers Boyle. “Scientific money that
is eaten up by administration, support, building maintenance, grounds crew.
And this side of Plum Island was essentially a Golden Cow.” John Boyle
explained how it worked during the reign of Dr. Callis: “Engineering would
say, ‘Well, we have this hurricane season, and we need [power] redundancy
up here because we may lose a 50,000-kilovolt transformer that might go out
on a Saturday night, when there’s no one around.’ They would use scare tactics like these, and add, ‘Now if we lose that 50-KV transformer, then we lose
power to Lab 101, we lose our negative airflow, and there’s danger of what
we have escaping out into the atmosphere.’ And it would scare the bejesus
out of management, so they’d say, ‘Here, take this $75,000 and purchase a
generator.’ They dazzled them with footwork.”
No longer would the tail wag the dog. To Breeze and his man Boyle, the primary need was not support, but rather Plum Island’s pièce de résistance, its holy grail: the science. Without science, there could be no glory. “The IRC was outrageous—it was 78 percent [of Plum Island’s yearly budget] when we got there.” At a normal lab, Boyle says, it would be in the low twenties. To improve science and keep the island from being shut down? “Shave the IRC down to a bare minimum,” says Boyle. No longer would engineering and plant management be the Golden Cow that got whatever it wanted. Boyle sharpened his pencil and got to number crunching, putting in late nights and seven-day workweeks, huddled over stacks of spreadsheets and financial data. With a stroke of his pencil, he slashed the animal supply contract and whittled down oil and new vehicle purchases. Next, he started counting up all the widgets—electric saws, toilet paper, circuit breakers, circuit boards, soap, hammers, nails, light bulbs—and figured out where costs were coming from. “We bought thirty items, used twelve, and they reported six in inventory,” he recalls. “People were carrying stuff off the island on Sundays, typical stuff people try to steal from the government—except here, they were doing it wholesale.”1 He installed a phone switchboard that provided reports of outgoing calls. “The day after I announced that one, there were cries I was violating people’s privacy.” But it worked—the monthly Plum Island phone bill plummeted in just one month from $7,000 to $3,000.
“John, I am hiring a doctor and I need an X-ray crystallography machine,” Breeze told Boyle early on. “It costs half a million dollars—now go find me the money for it.” Coming up with that kind of dough stumped even the uncanny number cruncher, who had just completed chiseling together a budget. He tore the whole thing apart again and found Breeze another $500,000, securing a renowned doctor’s transfer to Plum Island. “He was very demanding to work for,” Boyle says, smiling fondly, relishing working on the Breeze dream team. “I had to pull a string here and there and unravel it all and put it back together—and of course I found the money.” But from where had it come?
“If you watch the pennies,” Boyle’s parents had taught him growing up in hardscrabble Dorchester, an Irish Catholic inner-city Boston neighborhood, “the dollars will take care of themselves.” Now he was watching nickels and dimes, too, and to Breeze’s delight. “We cut a substantial amount of money,” says Boyle. “We cut well over a million dollars.” He believes even more could have been slashed. After six years on the job, says Boyle, “I still didn’t know where all the waste was. There was still some shit going on that I couldn’t put my finger on—which tormented me to no end.”
With the budget in Boyle’s capable hands, Breeze next brightened up the physical appearance of the laboratories, taking special interest in the toilets. “Nobody had cleaned these rest rooms—there would be no toilet paper, and the sinks were filthy. I wasn’t prepared to live with people not doing their job. Everything at Plum depends upon a handful of scientists who are pulling the train.” At a minimum, those scientists had to have sparkling bathrooms, perhaps the most basic of all provisions. “I had to completely remove all of the furniture in the toilets because it was so bad—so dirty—it couldn’t be cleaned.” Breeze ordered brand-new porcelain, metalwork fixtures, shiny faucets, and gleaming tile, and refinished the rest rooms. Then he explicitly set forth the frequency and manner in which they were to be cleaned. He also conducted unannounced spot checks throughout the week to ensure full compliance.2 “It was a personal tour de force,” Breeze gloats.
2 Director Breeze also took a similar interest with the hallway floors. In a moment of candor, he said to me, “It’s kind of silly when you hear a scientist talk about the hallways—is it waxed, is it shiny—why would you give a damn? But you are not going to create a top-class facility if you are only top-class about one thing.”
But that was only child’s play compared to what he did next.Within a year, the new administration had become a lean and mean machine, deaf to the rants and raves of the support staff and their supposed needs.3 So when Walter Sinowski, the building foreman of Lab 257, told them in early 1991 that an emergency backup power cable needed repair, management had a different answer this time around: no.
3 All the deep cost-cutting apparently didn’t extend to the creature comforts enjoyed by Dr. Breeze’s cabal. Boyle first worked in the Orient Point office, but Breeze soon moved him onto Plum Island. “He put me in possibly the best quarters on Plum Island,” remembers Boyle. “Talk about an Irish promotion!” From his desk in the old Army jail, he gazed through an all-glass solarium and viewed the parade ground and aqua blue waters beyond. He complained to Breeze that the greenhouse effect made the office unbearably hot. “I told him it might be seen as elitist if I install an air conditioner, and he said, ‘Yes, John, it will—but do it anyway.’ So I put a big-ass 12,000-BTU unit in there—and E&PM [engineering and plant management] didn’t like that at all.”
Roger Breeze had become a slave to science.
Soon after taking over the reins, Breeze set out to acquaint himself with the island’s three hundred daytime inhabitants. “When he first came in, we really thought he might be one of us,” says one worker. Whereas Jerry Callis wore a suit and tie to work each morning, Dr. Breeze scarcely looked like a doctor, let alone the director. Sporting a plaid shirt and jeans and smiling broadly, Breeze was slapping workers on the back as if they were old friends. Veteran employee Martin Weinmiller recalls Breeze coming ashore on his first day. Heading home after the graveyard shift, Weinmiller watched the ferry bearing the new director tie up at the harbor dock. “He walks off the boat, and looks out at the island for a time. Then he says, ‘Either I’m going to make this place or I’m going to break it.’ ”
Easing himself quite comfortably into the chair occupied by Dr. Callis for decades, Breeze quickly set the tone with employees with his newsletter, the Plum Island Diary:
I am sure that the last many months have been very frustrating and disheartening.... This Center is not going to close, we are not moving to another location....Together, we are going to plan and build the next proud 35 years of our history.
The impression potential recruits gain of [Plum Island] must be diminished by the shabby state of most of our buildings and grounds resulting from years of neglect—and I know that our loyal E&PM [engineering and plant maintenance] staff who have tried so hard to do so much must also be discouraged.
If we complain about federal salaries, crumbling buildings, and bureaucratic inertia, it should be no surprise that people lost interest in working here. Let’s be proud of what we do and speak positively wherever we can.
Those with problems and suggested solutions can help me more than those with problems alone.... Thanks for your input in advance.
The whispers began: Hey, look out for this guy. When Jerry Callis looked out upon his island from his office perched over the Army parade ground, he saw an honorable band of three hundred loyal, dedicated employees. Breeze saw support staff and veteran scientists as a motley gang of serfs, a drain on science funds that did little more than punch the clock and collect an oversized paycheck.
In Breeze’s first big move, he fired three scientists and forced a fourth into early retirement. He called the African swine fever virus team from the lab to his office and told them they had two weeks to pack up and leave. They were dumbfounded. “We had experiments with years of work gone into them,” says Dr. Richard Endris. “With Roger, there was no kinder, gentler way,” said another source. The team complained to the swine industry and the local congressman that taxpayers’ work was “going down the tubes.” That bought them a six-month reprieve. But once that time was up, Drs. Endris, Jerry Pan, Gertrude Schloer, and their leader, Bill Hess—a forty-year Plum Island veteran—were out on their rears. “He’s seen fit to change directions,” the seventy-two-year-old Dr. Hess drily told a reporter, “which is his privilege.”
In Breeze’s opinion, the four scientists were repeating the same science, or as one Breeze official said, “Reinventing the wheel, over and over again,” testing viruses on one tick species after another. Said the official of the sacked four, “They were the worst of the worst—one of them hadn’t published a research paper in nine years. Another one hadn’t written one in five years. Sat there on their dead asses leaning on their elbows. They knew it was coming.”
Contrary to what others said, Dr. Endris and Dr. Hess had published scientific papers in recent years. Breeze’s reasoning that it was time for a genetically engineered vaccine for African swine fever made little sense to Endris, who says African swine fever antibody proteins (like Dr. Bachrach’s VP3) just didn’t have the prophylactic properties necessary. “[Breeze] did not understand the biology of it, didn’t have the grasp of it— but he didn’t let that get in the way of his politics.” Ironically, Endris was one of those few on Plum Island who thought Dr. Callis’s departure might be a good thing. A new director could rejuvenate the crumbling laboratory and reinvigorate its mission, he thought. Now he knew just how wrong he was. “Personally, after I saw what replaced [Callis],” he admits fifteen years later, “I wish he had stayed.”
Breeze then confronted the remaining scientists. Sitting them all down, he berated them with facts and figures—the number of test animals purchased compared to the number of scientific papers produced. The number wasn’t nearly high enough and the few papers published were terrible. “This was really sad,” Dr. Jim House would growl years later. “The part that’s bothersome is that he tried to play down the accomplishments of those who had been there before him—not one time, but numerous times. He tried to make their accomplishments look petty.”
There was another reason the scientists were pushed out—to make room in the budget for a new ferry.
In its long history, the secretary of agriculture’s advisory committee, made up of representatives from livestock industries, had never met outside of Washington, D.C. Breeze proposed to Washington that the committee meet this year in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, to see Plum Island. As a friendly gesture to their new exotic disease lab director, the aggies agreed to organize it—but on one condition: he would not, under any circumstances, ask the committee for money. “The Department was going to put $1 million into the island and that was going to be it—and I was not to ask them [for any more],” says Breeze.
They all came out one morning—the National Cattlemen’s Association, the Pork Producers’ Council, and the dairy and poultry associations— all the groups that had a multibillion-dollar stake in what some might label “corporate welfare.” Plum Island had always been painted as essential to the American people—wholesome, apple pie research to protect the food supply, defensive research that private industry just wouldn’t do. But when the twenty dark suits crowded onto a boat bound for Plum Island with “Cap’n” Breeze, the scene looked less vital to the taxpaying public than to the billion-dollar agribusiness conglomerates the captain’s passengers represented.4
4 A few years later, Tom Cook, president of the National Cattlemen’s Association, would tell the New York Times that when it came to Plum Island, “Our bottom line . . . is we want to see the most dollars made available for research.”
In evangelical tones, Dr. Breeze walked and talked the group through the deteriorating laboratory, preaching how he planned to shore up its crumbling foundations, rid the place of the driftwood, clean the bathrooms, shine the floors, and bring science—glorious science. “He was very charming,” says one observer. “So charming he could melt snowballs in the Antarctic.” But meeting again the next day, the Pied Piper’s smile had turned down at its corners. He talked hard and fast at them in his distinct accent.
“This place is never going to fly. You can’t keep doing this business with the island falling down. We need $40 million here. We need it. I’m delivering the program, I’m hiring the people—but it won’t work without $40 million.” Breeze had previously been told by his engineers that it would cost about $25 million in total to repair the island into tip-top shape. He paused and looked at them, head cocked for effect.
“Now if you don’t want to do it, that’s fine—and we’ll all walk away. No problem—I’ll go find another job.” But heads in front of him were nodding. We’re with you, Roger, we are—we are!
They were. Thumbing his nose at his superiors, Breeze had secured, in a matter of days, a construction program that Plum Island had failed to get under way for decades. The livestock groups got behind it, and leaned heavily on reluctant USDA officials and Congress to give way. Though infuriated with their insubordinate new director, there was little Washington could do about it. How did his superiors respond? “Well,” says Breeze, smiling, “everybody changes. If there was no money, it was all over, and they might as well have known that. You cannot make bricks without clay.” Breeze soon had $22 million of clay in his hands ($3 million shy of his personal goal, but still enough) to build some 58,000 square feet of new space and renovate another 45,000 square feet. It was a truly remarkable feat.
Successful in dividing Washington officials from their industry advisory group, he trained his sights on the island, and on how to grab the animal kingdom for himself.
Long Island’s North Fork was far too remote a place to attract good scientists, said Breeze. The cost of living there was far too high for government-salaried postdocs. Opportunities for spouses were also limited, except maybe to wait tables or work retail cash registers. As far as raising children, some scientists thought the school system fell short. “You’d have to go way up the Island to find any real sophistication,” says one. And another, “The area is dead . . . it is not the type of place to attract young, upwardly mobile professionals. God knows how many miles you are from the nearest quality health care.” Locals couldn’t fill the scientific need, Breeze believed; they lacked the requisite education and experience. Recruiting would soundly fail. The laboratory would indeed fall into the sea, and with it would go Cap’n Breeze.
But there was a solution. By running a ferry across the Sound to Connecticut, Breeze could provide the scientists with a better place to live, one with a lower cost of living and better schools and real employment opportunities for spouses. At the same time, Plum Island would be connected with the Amtrak station there, allowing a link to universities like Yale and the University of Connecticut. “This ferry will turn Plum Island around,” the new director boldly predicted. “It will help make us the number one research center in the world.”
The Connecticut ferry’s first customer was none other than Director Roger Breeze. He moved with his wife and children to a house in Cheshire. “I had to be on [the Connecticut boat],” he said. “It doesn’t matter to me where I live. I just didn’t think people would take it seriously without me being there.”5 The ferry’s heaviest load was a mere seven or eight passengers. Former ferry engineer Ed Hollreiser says the boat often ferried a single passenger. Once, one of the new scientists Dr. Breeze recruited (all of whom “chose” Connecticut as their place of residence) realized he’d forgotten an important book while en route to the island. The ferry was sent all the way back to Connecticut, where a deckhand went and fished the book out of the scientist’s trunk and brought it back—to the tune of $400 in marine fuel.
5 But Dr. Breeze didn’t even attempt to live on Long Island. The director lived alone on Plum Island in an old Army barracks until his family moved east from Washington State and joined him in Connecticut.
It was an open secret that new hires must hail from the Nutmeg State. “Anyone that wanted to work on Plum Island at that time—even on support staff—had to be from Connecticut,” says a worker. Among the scientists and support staff interviewed who ventured opinions on the ferry, all of them suspected Breeze’s wife was the motivation behind it. They say she disliked the countrified North Fork, and the closest university teaching positions for her were miles away at Stony Brook. With its many colleges and universities, Connecticut offered far better opportunities for her and the children. While all of this may be true, the director’s own motivations seemed far deeper than pleasing his wife.
As ridership on the Connecticut ferry increased, professional camaraderie at the laboratory began to decline. People were beginning to fraternize based upon which boat—and from which state—they hailed. The move “set up two classes on the island,” said Ed Hollreiser, “[Breeze’s] people from Connecticut and us peons from Long Island.” “I don’t have a personal problem with him,” notes Dr. Jim House. “But he caused a divisiveness between the New York and Connecticut people. He created the Connecticut people because to him, no one smart would live on [the New York] side. But for forty years it had worked without it.” Dr. Carol House agrees. “He would have conversations with people on the Connecticut boat that [the New York staff ] wouldn’t be privy to.”
The ferry was a top-of-the-line, luxurious $1.2 million, 540-horsepower, 110-foot-long boat—but there were flaws from the start. Hollreiser said there were design problems with the engines, and the exhaust noise ran afoul of local town ordinances. “It was like they bought a Yugo,” says a former worker. “The engines constantly blew up and it cost the government big dollars in repairs.” When they finally got the leaky, noisy, shuddering craft running, it cost a hefty $100,000 a year to operate—a significant chunk of funds for a “cost cutting” regime to bear.
Dr. Breeze maintains that “it had been difficult to fill jobs in the past,” but nothing in the records indicate that local hiring over the previous four decades had been problematic at all. As veteran Fran Demorest wrote, “The professional staff moved to Long Island, bought or built homes, raised their families and used our school systems. These families joined in the many local community activities, services, churches, and other programs.” Breeze’s detractors, large and small, would always say the Connecticut ferry was a colossal waste, a sham, all the way down to the nifty uniforms he dressed the marine crews in. Even the local congressman decried the move. “It sounds like a total waste of money,” snapped George Hochbrueckner, a Democrat representing New York’s First Congressional District. “It sounds like a few people—including Mr. Breeze—decided they wanted to live in Connecticut. The taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for this. . . . This does not make any sense to me.” But the USDA had paid for it, and the congressman’s objections were for naught.6
6 Hochbrueckner would tell the New York Times a few years later regarding the Connecticut ferry, “If we realized the situation earlier, I would have made a point... but now the die is cast... we’re too far downstream.”
Even had he tried, Hochbrueckner could never have reversed the ferry. Because Dr. Breeze saw to it that undoing his Connecticut boat would be akin to unscrambling eggs. In a masterstroke, he did the one thing that would grant his new ferry perpetuity. He lionized the one man whose name was inextricably entwined with Plum Island, invoking in a simple step the potent feelings of a warm and distant past that instantly hushed would-be critics.
He named the boat after Jerry Callis.
The opinions of two of his allies are enlightening. “Yes, it was Roger’s idea,” says John Boyle, when asked who named the Connecticut ferry. “In my heart of hearts, I would never tell you what my honest opinion of that particular thing is. There are still a few things about him I can’t quite figure out. He can be inscrutable—even to his closest friends.”
The definitive word comes from Dr. Breeze’s dear friend Dr. Robert Shope, with whom Breeze had lived after he legally separated from his first wife.7 “He lived in Connecticut and wanted the ferry for himself. The excuse was that it would bring in a broader group of scientists—and it was a very controversial move.” What did Shope think of the naming of the ferry? “It was very clever,” Shope mused. “The J. J. Callis—he had it painted on the boat before anybody knew it—[after that] you couldn’t take the boat away and nobody could counter the move.” For no other reason than his own self-interest, Breeze traded on the good will his revered predecessor’s good name, and in the process sliced the island’s workforce into two parts.
7 “He and I have had a very good social relationship,” says Dr. Shope, when asked about Roger Breeze. “I had separated from my wife and was living in Connecticut at the time and had a bachelor’s house. He knocked on my door one night and said, ‘Bob, do you have a spare room for me?’ And I said, ‘Yes, but I don’t have a bed in it.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry—I have a mattress in my car.’ This was at a time when he was having marital problems, and he lived with me for about three months. So I got to know him well.”
“Meanwhile, Walt had been retired already from another job, and working at Plum was something he was good at and enjoyed doing. Walt said to him, ‘You can take it right now, Breeze. Go right ahead.’ We’d sit there and take that crap from him, day in and day out.
“And then one day—it happened. It really, truly happened.”
The A-76 federal privatization program had visited Plum Island two times since its inception in 1980. The rules stated the government had to step aside when the private sector could perform the government’s nonprofessional tasks, provided no “overriding factors” required the government to keep those functions federalized. On both previous occasions, Dr. Callis invoked the “overriding factors” exception and staved off privatization, arguing that Plum Island functions were far too sensitive to be contracted out. Placing two high-hazard biological containment laboratories in the hands of a private company would shift the emphasis from safety to profits. And it would kill employee morale. Why take the chance? Plum Island remained under federal control. Until Dr. Breeze arrived.
In 1988, a year after Breeze took control, a performance work statement (PWS) was prepared. This was essentially a chart of all the tasks that private contractors (and the government’s own “in house” team) would bid on. From the start, there were signs that the PWS was prepared incorrectly. In an internal memorandum, the government review panel noted “many misleading statements concerning the real situation with underground storage tanks, existing fuel spills, the chemical management program... etc.” The panel said the PWS had been “sugarcoated” and charged it did “not reflect the reality of the true pressing problems” at Plum Island. It seemed like the PWS was being rigged to lure an unsuspecting outside contractor into snatching the bid.
“It was a political decision to do it,” Dr. Breeze says today of the Plum Island privatization. “It had nothing to do with me or anybody else in USDA—that’s just the way it is.” But at the time, responding to the review panel, Dr. Breeze exploded. “There are no misleading statements,” he wrote. Instead, the panel had “misunderstood several issues. . . . There are no obvious deficiencies we know of. . . . If [the review panel] feels this PWS is ‘sugarcoated,’ I am very willing to make their specific concerns known.” Definitive words from someone who supposedly had nothing to do with it.
On Thursday morning, February 21, 1991, four sealed envelopes were opened in Washington. Burns & Roe Services Corporation of New Jersey was awarded the five-year Plum Island contract, with the lowest and best bid: $16.3 million. The government’s in-house team had bid $23.7 million on the same exact PWS. The private contractor had underbid the in-house bid by $7.4 million—more than 30 percent lower. The disparity meant one of two things. Either the private contractor grossly underestimated the costs of the Plum Island project, or the in-house government team engaged in the unfathomable: it tanked its own bid.
Breeze explains his point of view. “There is no secret to this. There’s no way you can shuffle cards around, if you are giving people decent jobs with full medical benefits and all the other benefits that accrue with having a job with the federal government. You cannot compete with people that are being paid minimum wage, with minimal benefits—it’s not possible. It’s actually not something I agree with. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do by any means. But that’s the process.”
Breeze says the two bids during the Callis regime beat the private bids because they combined tasks. Those bids said: “Firefighters would act as janitors, and take away the garbage and clean the toilets and mop the rest rooms . . . the boat crew will maintain motor vehicles, and et cetera. And if that would have been clear up front, that firefighters weren’t going to clean rest rooms, there would have been janitors and the government would have lost.” John Boyle, who admits he was “heavily involved” in the privatization process, said, “You have to be really, really creative to have the government submit the winning bid. We put together a good bid—a competitive contract. To preserve it, [the union] had to give something up, and they didn’t want to give up some jobs. I was quite frankly afraid we were going to win it. I didn’t want to win it.”
Most Americans instantly recall exactly where they were and what they were doing at the moment they heard President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, or that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded. For Plum Islanders, May 3, 1991, was one of those days.
John Boyle recalls the moment he heard Plum Island would be privatized for the first time in its history. “I was sitting in my office, staring out on the lawn, out on Gardiner’s Bay, just daydreaming for a few moments, when Ernie [Escarcega, Breeze’s facilities manager] calls me and says, ‘A-76 is coming in!’ And I thought, ‘Well, thank God.’ I personally considered it a blessing. . . .” Walking out of his office, Boyle saw men wringing their hands and women crying in the hallways. “Crestfallen is way too mild a word. For these people, it was like getting news your son was killed in a car crash. I am not overstating it, either.” Dr. Breeze also remembers the scene. “Chaos—it was the first time any of the employees had an inkling they might really lose their jobs.”
Seizing the moment, the very next morning Burns & Roe executives called an all-hands 8:00 a.m. meeting in the old Army chapel. Exhausted, Stanley Mickaliger had just finished an eight-hour graveyard shift in Lab 257 and trudged over to the chapel. “When I got to the meeting hall, they were already introducing each other, giving all these speeches—all these men with suntan lotion on all over, you know? It clearly wasn’t the government anymore. They were these big contractor types.” As the crowd slowly filed in, they were handed sealed envelopes holding the documents that determined the fate of their careers. Mickaliger walked over to an official looking woman for guidance. She told him they were not taking questions, not now—“You have to catch the ten a.m. boat because we’re not going to be paying overtime anymore. You can look at your letter on the boat.”
Shunted onto the ferry, Mickaliger and the others tore open their letters. “It had all this information, on a bunch of papers, but I didn’t understand a lot of it.” One thing was clear, though—he’d been fired. And the severance package was nil. The fifteen-year-veteran’s remaining choices were a bit limited. “I could have went to Calverton [National Cemetery, a nearby federal facility with openings], but that wasn’t my cup of tea. See, I had been a master plumber for forty years. Now I’m going to dig graves and bury people? My wife and I lost our health insurance at age sixty—I had to pay 102 percent of the cost. The letter said if I retired, I got only 40 percent of the eligible Social Security benefit I paid into all those years. I remember complaining to them, saying, ‘Hey, I know guys here have thirty years in. But I’ve put in a good fifteen years—do you think you can help me?’ They gave me COBRA for six months.”8
8 When the contractor came in, a Burns & Roe corporate vice president had big news for his new charges. “All employees will receive, in addition to their base salaries, $2.07 per hour. And they can do whatever they want with it.” Of course, nearly all were forced to apply the extra dollars to the health insurance premiums that tripled, just as their annual salaries plummeted.
The days of “respecting personal dignity... recognizing work achievement . . . providing work security” were over. So was the old feeling that working on Plum Island was like being part of an extended family, that it was a career. For the roughly one hundred support workers left behind (which would decrease to seventy-five by 1995), employment at the Plum Island exotic germ laboratory would now simply be a job. And thereafter it would have all the dedication to mission, attention to detail, pride in workmanship, and camaraderie that accompanied a job.
A newspaper editorial published at the time captured the moment: “How would you feel if you worked for somebody for 15 years and a new boss came in and told you that you were losing your seniority and most of your benefits? What’s more, you will be paid half of what you were paid to do the same job and your annual vacation days will be reduced from 25 to zero in the first year.” And that was only if the contractor kept your position—“Remember,” says one employee, “those that were allowed to stay were offered ‘a’ job, not ‘your’ job.” And those were the lucky ones. A deeper sympathy was reserved for the seventy-five or so that were fired or pushed off the island into the bitter seas of early retirement. The negative effects on the community of the privatization layoffs at Plum Island, the east end’s largest employer, were real.9
9 In time, east end engineers and skilled tradesmen found diminished opportunities, serving thousands of wealthy summer colonists on the North Fork and in the Hamptons in the fine arts of pool cleaning, tennis court maintenance, landscaping, and golf course maintenance. A few dug graves at Calverton National Cemetery.
Even the USDA grudgingly admitted it had been a “challenging transition period.” A former Plum Island official described the transition with a bit more flavor. He calls it “the biggest clusterfuck you ever saw in your life.”
Like he did with the ferry debacle, Congressman Hochbrueckner complained again, saying privatization “was handled poorly. The workers were treated shabbily.” For a politician who publicly bemoaned the woes of Plum Island numerous times, he accomplished surprisingly little. Says Dr. Breeze of Hochbrueckner rants, “He said, ‘I’m going to block it,’ and that was just disingenuous at best. He knew quite well the way privatization worked. He knew exactly what was going to happen.”
The congressman wasn’t the only one feigning powerlessness. “I wanted the government to hold a series of meetings where you explained to the workers the process under way,” explains Dr. Breeze. “Absolutely nobody would do that and it wasn’t up to me to do it. I actually couldn’t get it done.” Those meetings never happened. Breeze says he had nothing to do with the privatization or the transition, though the record clearly indicates the opposite. He could have, like Dr. Callis before him, warded off the A-76 guillotine by invoking the “overriding factors” exception, based on the island’s unique risks and unfathomable dangers among federal facilities. After all, Plum Island was no run-of-the-mill federal office building, where you’d apply for a passport or pick up a Social Security check. “When Dr. Callis was there, we had the rigid safety standards that almost made it impossible for the contractor to bid,” says a longtime Plum Island scientist. “And they could have applied for an exemption this time around, but they didn’t.”
Retired Plum Island scientists Drs. Jim and Carol House believe without question that Breeze had the power to halt the privatization steamroller. “He could have stopped it, prevented it,” says Jim. “Oh yeah, absolutely.” Carol adds, “The next time [privatization] came up, [Breeze] threw in all of the inside support services, so it became a big enough ‘plum’ to bid on—he reengineered the [PWS] so that more was included. He personally did that.” “We said from day zero that this is a place that should not be contracted out,” continues Jim House. “It can’t be—there are just too many concerns.” Despite their beliefs now, Plum Island scientists remained silent, instead of speaking out to fight the process. As a result, many of the support workers, says union leader Ed Hollreiser, felt betrayed.
As one employee said, “All it took was the swipe of a pen” to prevent Plum Island from being contracted out. But Dr. Breeze kept his pen in his pocket protector.
When asked why he wanted to see the government lose the bid, John Boyle replies, “Because I felt at that time—the neophyte that I was—that getting into the private sector would save money and that [the contractor] would get rid of the riffraff, and it would run more efficiently for less money.” The USDA, indeed, trumpeted the Plum Island privatization. They said contracting out to Burns & Roe would save taxpayers $1 million a year, and that support costs would decline by $5 million, or 20 percent, over the length of the contract.
Not everyone thought it would be a financial windfall, however. One prescient senior employee told a newspaper, “There will be cost overruns, and eventually it will cost more than it did with the people they laid off.” Later, it would be learned that the PWS grossly underestimated the required material and manpower to run Plum Island.10
10 For example, the PWS estimated 43 vehicles, 15 daily ferry trips, 50 biological air filters, and 75 meals. In actuality there were 51 vehicles to operate, 24 ferry trips to make, 98 air filters to regularly maintain and replace, and 135 meals to prepare.
After Burns & Roe came in, John Boyle was let go, the contractor having no need for his services. But eight months later, the contractor begged
the financial wizard to come back because things were spiraling out of control. When he returned, Boyle didn’t find a mess—he found nothing. “They
had no accounting system to speak of. They had hired a bookkeeper who
did not know what cost accounting was. I built a new accounting system
there, from the ground up.” And when he finished his task, he delivered
some bad news. “They were over $1 million in the red. I knew about it two
or three weeks before, when I started seeing the signs, and I was thinking,
‘Jesus, this isn’t going to turn around.’ They wanted to shoot me.”
In most organizations, taking out the trash, tending the grounds, mowing the lawns, and providing clerical support seem like responsibilities that should be handled by a contractor. But Plum Island is not your typical institution. Positions like firefighters, security guards, ferry operators, engineers, incinerator operators, ventilation system operators, electric operators, nitrogen freezer caretakers, power monitors, and sewer decontamination plant operators hold seriously heightened responsibilities. At the home of the most dangerous germs known to man, even the grounds crew and typists must be specially trained and abide by complicated guidelines. Ed Hollreiser comments, “My take is that management was so poor, contracting out would be an easier way to go. This way, they could yell at someone now besides themselves. They could hold a contractor accountable and blame them for all the mishaps.”
A USDA laboratory in Ames, Iowa, was also put out for privatization at this time. Though the Ames lab houses far less dangerous germs, the staff there, surprisingly, remained under federal government control. And it remains in federal hands today. In August 2003, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin fought off a renewed push to privatize Ames by introducing legislation barring non-governmental workers at the laboratory. He called Ames’s research “a vital function of the federal government, and it should remain the responsibility of federal employees.” There seems to be no other reason for this glaring inconsistency between the two laboratories than the personal wishes of a director looking to slash non-research costs and yoke his workforce. Breeze muses, “It’s sort of surprising that Ames hasn’t gone out to a contractor. I think it will eventually go to a contractor—it’s just a push that various administrations do to different degrees.”
Privatization resulted in federally trained, highly skilled workers with decades of experience being bartered away in exchange for a cost-cutting, efficiency-driven private contractor. But on paper, it looked good, and the credit redounded to Plum Island’s director, Dr. Breeze. Most important for Breeze, it freed up more funds for science, his primary goal. At least that’s how it was supposed to go.
Back in 1965, Jerry Callis described his island laboratory at an international conference by saying, “Safety is uppermost in our minds in everything we do.” If that meant less money for science, then so be it. Some three decades later, costs, not safety, were uppermost in management’s minds. With the support staff slashed by 40 percent, and the Breeze team cutting every support line item, some other details—like biological safety and security—were compromised. For starters, the two-day Plum Island orientation course, after which new employees were ordered to study a three-inch-thick safety manual as if it were the Bible, was now boiled down to a forty-minute VHS tape and a two-page flyer. The “Nothing Leaves” policy was abandoned. Vehicles and items trafficked among the two laboratory buildings, Long Island, and Connecticut without being decontaminated at all. Contractors, who once had to be escorted (“The escort had to take a shower with these men, take their cigarette breaks with them, even go into the bathroom with them,” remembers one), now roamed free.11 The color-coded badge system was discontinued, and the identification numbers disappeared. Against the advice of an outside consulting firm, the fiveman full-time professional fire department was converted to one firefighter and a bucket brigade of volunteers.12
11 For the record, I was escorted during the last of my six visits to Plum Island.
12 An outside consulting firm hired to evaluate the Plum Island Fire Department recommended three options to Dr. Breeze: buy new equipment and retain the full-time professional department; retain the outmoded equipment and the department; or buy new equipment and institute a volunteer brigade of workers performing other functions. The firm stated that the volunteer brigade, while the cheapest, was “the worst of the three options.” Dr. Breeze chose that option. After one fire alarm went off under his reorganized fire department, Dr. Breeze was thoroughly disgusted—with his own choice—as reflected in an internal memo blasting a supervisor: “An ill-assorted group of people drift up wearing various items of clothing, but usually not the firefighter turnout gear we went [through the trouble] to provide, and mill about without apparent discipline or leadership.”
For years, security on intruders was “like white on rice,” as one veteran employee describes it. The once thirty-four-man-strong armed guard platoon—checking off ID numbers at the ferry dock, manning the lab compound gatehouses—was dispensed with. One “safety technician” now stood in place of all the guards. He wore an empty gun holster to scare away intruders. One of the fired security guards, Phillip Zerillo, told a reporter there was “a total disregard for security. . . . The place is just going crazy. It’s running by luck now.” Today it’s no different. “You could walk onto that island right now,” says an employee. “Two Eskimos in a kayak could invade and take Plum Island.”13 There are two private security firm guards, one at Orient Point and one protecting all of Plum Island. The U.S. Coast Guard patrolled the island’s surrounding waters until 1977, when it decommissioned the Plum Island Lighthouse. After a brief Plum Island detail following September 11, 2001, Coast Guard cutters again retreated, leaving Plum Island without any marine patrol.
13 Indeed, on August 1, 1997, vandals from Connecticut came over to Plum Island by boat and vandalized the Plum Island Lighthouse. By chance, the Plum Island marine crew at Orient Point noticed them and shooed them away. On several occasions I was offered the opportunity to be smuggled onto Plum Island: “We could get on my boat, put you in a lab coat, put you ashore, and you can walk right into the laboratory. You can go in and walk out with whatever you want.” Though the offers seemed both convincing and tantalizing, I declined.
An internal memorandum dispensing with and erasing away decades of safety closed on an bizarre note: “We welcome any and all suggestions, recommendations, criticisms, and attaboys . . . as well as fishing tips, a good joke, and restaurant recommendations.”
In perhaps the most egregious of the safety lapses, the sentinel animals, Plum Island’s “canaries in the mine,” were eliminated. These test animals were kept outdoors and tested periodically to ensure no germs had escaped the lab. Said a USDA safety director of the move, “From a biological safety perspective, the best thing that ever happened to Plum was the discontinuation of Animal Supply,” because he believed it eliminated the threat of disease transmission. But it also eliminated the island’s last line of defense. After all, they had successfully alerted the Plum Island scientists to the virus outbreak. Having the control animals outside “keeps you honest,” says Plum Island scientist Dr. Doug Gregg. It was akin to a mother removing the smoke detector from her baby’s bedroom. The laboratories, now more than ever, became ticking time bombs and the public, unknowing sitting ducks.
But one thing remained clear: the new way was certainly cheaper. And the cost-conscious attack on safety soon became literal—the Plum Island biological safety office itself suffered. First it was divided into contractor safety and government safety. Then contractor safety was eliminated, and the government safety department was slashed down to three staffers. The money saved went toward recruits’ salaries and their new scientific equipment, and amenities like touring bicycles and a high-tech exercise gym.
Veteran scientists became concerned over the hacking away of four decades of carefully thought-out biological safety procedures. Former Plum Islander Dr. Ronald Yedoutschnig told a reporter, “When I was there, every person on the island was the same. But today, there are fewer permanent employees. I would be more safety conscious because the [new] people are less safety conscious. The agents we are working with are highly infectious.” Says Dr. Richard Endris: “When I was there, the safety was good. Now when it went from a system that is based on employee loyalty and integrity to one of the lowest bidder, I was very concerned that safety would be compromised. Little things, like the backup power generator going out during a storm. The redundant systems are the absolute key. You have to maintain air pressure, the airflow, the freezers. . . .”
Dr. Gregg ponders what privatization has wrought upon the island’s morale. “Morale is not as good,” he says. High turnover in the workforce contributes further to the problem. “The contracting out was a major blow to the unity of the island,” says Dr. Jim House, “and it’s still a problem today. A lot of the esprit de corps with the people is gone—they’re not there for more than a year and there’s a turnover. The turnover after two, three years had 90 percent of the people gone—people that had been there for years.” Unfortunately, low morale often translates into poor performance on the job.
The USDA should best be able to assess Plum Island’s safety. Out of a possible 100 points under rating system, the USDA scored Burns & Roe, the contractor they chose to run Plum Island, 54.3, 43.9, and 60. The score of 60 was the minimum acceptable performance number.
Sometimes poetry captures the human condition better than prose. Plum Island Lighthouse keeper Captain William Wetmore penned “Plum Island” in the mid-1800s:
One hundred and fifty years later, this line and verse was pulled from a file in Lab 101:
One employee summed it up more succinctly: “Breeze? “Breeze was a fucking doomsday machine.”
Well spoken and outspoken, Fran resolved to do something, and in 1990 she wrote Congressman Hochbrueckner a six-page single-spaced letter carefully detailing everything she heard. “If I should be harassed and then forced to take my retirement,” Fran wrote, “I shall do so. But I feel that someone has to attempt to stop what is being done to and at Plum Island. I started employment on March 15th, 1954, and am still very active, in good health, maintain an impeccable leave record, and desire to continue working at PIADC.” She proceeded to describe the firing of the four scientists, the ferryboat escapade, the inequitable perks afforded to new scientists, and now the privatization debacle. “This is a lengthy letter,” she closed, “and I hope it has provided fuel, facts, and additional information... looking forward to you taking the ‘bull by the horns.’ ” Following Fran Demorest from that point, one had to wonder if Dr. Roger Breeze had somehow come upon a copy of her courageous letter.
Breeze was enamored with The Silence of the Lambs, the thriller that mentions Plum Island as a summer getaway for the evil Dr. Hannibal Lecter. He actually decorated his office with a life-sized cutout of the cannibalistic Dr. Lecter. Breeze’s next move seemed like a page right out of Thomas Harris’s novel. Soon after she wrote the letter, he ordered Fran to take a new assignment: the sixty-seven-year-old grandmother was relegated to the murky basement of Building 14 for a special project in Central Files—the obliteration of Central Files. In a cruel twist, the longtime assistant librarian was forced to discard Plum Island’s entire library of records. “I was ordered to destroy everything—everything! I was to clean out all of it, because he said there was no more need for it.” Exiled to the musty catacombs of the hundred-year-old Army hospital, Fran destroyed forty years of historical records—they were shredded, bagged, and lined up in the dank hallway awaiting the incinerator. What about the preservation of Plum Island’s past? “Breeze didn’t give a damn about the island’s history,” says Dr. Gregg. “He wanted everything thrown out.”
“When he took me off my job and put me down in that basement,” says Fran, “it just felt humiliating.” Barely finished with bagging the shredded records, she was transferred again, to the telephone switchboard in the guardhouse. While trying her best to handle her new responsibility over the next two months, Fran became gradually lethargic and had to be hospitalized. Her doctor diagnosed her with bilateral severe maxillary sinusitis.
She was unsure of the cause of that condition—the otherwise healthy Fran had never before felt tightness in her chest and sinus pain—until a scientist checking in with her after her hospital stay put his finger on it. Unknowingly, Fran had been inhaling insidious formaldehyde vapors seeping into the switchboard room. When notified of this, Plum Island’s brass had the solution. She was transferred to the rusted, corrugated steel warehouse at the harbor, to chug around on a grimy forklift and record inventory. Physically weakened and mentally drained from the abuse, Fran Demorest quit her job (“I took my retirement,” she prefers to say with pride). She wasn’t surprised by the antics—she had predicted them when she wrote her letter.
“Fran needed to be fired because you couldn’t change her,” remembers John Boyle. “Fired or transferred into some other job where she wasn’t involved in everybody’s business—I think we eliminated her job. I’m not certain.”
And, thought Breeze and his minions, that was one less voice they had to contend with from the Plum Island peanut gallery.
THE BROKEN PACT
For decades, little was known about Plum Island, owing in large part to the blind loyalty of those who worked there. The initial tumult over the USDA’s “choice” of Plum Island had long ago faded from memory. The three hundred strong, locally hired workforce put bread on many a table on the bucolic North Fork, increasingly hampered by an evaporating rural economy in need of jobs with good pay, security, and retirement benefits. A close-knit Plum Island family grew, strengthened by the ferry ride each morning, like children riding to school together on a big yellow bus. Employees’ children—children of scientists, secretaries, and steamfitters— went to east end schools together and played sports together. Workers—of both white- and blue-collar extraction—went fishing together, and barbequed together on the weekends. If you didn’t work on Plum Island, chances were two or three of your friends or neighbors did. An unspoken pact evolved, an implicit bond between the Plum Island workforce and the brass: attacking Plum Island wouldn’t be attacking your place of work—it would bring shame upon your family. Better to be tight-lipped about our Plum Island, went the thinking, because the press and general public doesn’t understand us and always discredits us, and makes us look bad— and that’s not good for business. That’s not good for our family. “It was a great-paying job with great benefits,” said one worker, “when others around here were digging clams and planting potatoes—so we kept it quiet. And management basically said to us: ‘We’ll keep this place safe, you keep your mouth shut, and we’ll take care of you.’ ”
But many now felt that Dr. Roger Breeze had shredded, like with Central Files, that pact of loyalty, stuffed it in a big black bag, and sent it to the incinerator. And unlike a typical corporate downsizing, here the employees knew the downsizing and vile treatment were preventable, had the director really cared about them or the nature of the work being performed.
Dr. Breeze would pay the price for his disloyalty. The floodgates opened and revelations poured forth. Federal agencies started receiving an unprecedented number of anonymous phone calls about the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. So did the major newspapers, and the television stations. The Federal Office of Special Counsel, which runs the toll-free whistleblower program, received more anonymous tips about Plum Island than about any other federal facility in the nation.
Workers called the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington, D.C., and told them about large sewage spills and massive landfills and Army bunkers filled with drums of hazardous chemicals. They reported leaking underground oil tanks, a sewage plant that didn’t work properly, and a faulty wastewater treatment plant that dumped untested sewage into Long Island Sound. They told them fellow workers were ordered to toss unmarked plastic bottles and Clorox bottles filled with unknown liquid chemicals into the incinerators. Workers were told to run the incinerators only when the winds blew due east, out toward the Atlantic Ocean, to avoid mainland detection of noxious emission clouds.
An incredulous EPA came out to Plum Island to investigate the claims. They couldn’t believe their eyes. They came upon dump sites and bunkers stuffed with scores of rusting (and ruptured) metal drums containing solvents, oils, ethylene oxide, creosote, hydrochloric acid, and paraformaldehyde, and still more drums that contained unknowns. They toured the wastewater treatment plant and found it out of service, along with effluent that wasn’t chlorinated to kill germs and a storm pipe that ran straight into the sound without going through treatment. The EPA then witnessed thick black smoke billowing out of the Lab 101 incinerator, and asked for samples of the ash to test for toxic content.
The EPA cited Plum Island for multiple violations of the Clean Water Act and environmental laws prohibiting the storage of hazardous materials. Threatened with legal action, the USDA agreed to stop polluting, and to spend $150,000 on remediation efforts.
The USDA knew for years about these environmental conditions and that they might come to light one day. A letter by the assistant secretary of agriculture, dated years before the EPA investigation, noted Plum Island’s “improper handling of asbestos-containing material [forty thousand pounds worth], sanitary landfills in violation of state standards, and improper management of hazardous wastes.” But they never told the EPA. Dissatisfied with Plum Island’s snail-paced remediation progress, the EPA brought legal action against the USDA, seeking $111,000 in civil penalties for the environmental and hazardous waste law violations. Years after the action was brought, much of the waste still remained. Again, the EPA charged the USDA with violating federal environmental laws. In 1999, the USDA agreed to pay $32,500 in fines (a fraction of the earlier fine) and promised, once again, not to violate laws protecting the environment.
Whistleblowers also called the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), telling them about employees becoming strangely ill from exposure to unknown animal viruses and bacteria. OSHA learned about the lack of a biological workplace safety program, and of inconsistent vaccine programs. The agency also learned about radioactive isotopes being handled without monitors and protective equipment, locked emergency exit doors, and about the professional fire department being replaced with an unqualified volunteer bucket brigade.
OSHA was far less skeptical about problems at Plum Island than the EPA. Plum Island had made OSHA’s “High Hazard List” of unsafe workplaces back in 1988, when workers’ compensation claims on the island were found to be triple the national average. Investigating the island, OSHA inspectors quickly discovered exposed electrical cables, shoddy electric outlets, open incinerator pits, untested fire alarms, expired fire extinguishers, locked emergency exit doors, unmarked hot water pipes, and workers bitten and trampled by animals. OSHA cited the USDA for no less than 139 workplace safety violations. When asked by a local newspaper about the violations, Dr. Breeze explained that $50,000 would be redirected from important road-sealing and building painting projects to correct the OSHA safety violations. The money would not be coming out of scientific funds, he said, including those earmarked for new equipment, the fleet of bikes, or the scientists’ exercise gym.
On national average, OSHA on-site inspections occur about once every eighty years. But OSHA returned to Plum Island five years later. This time around, OSHA not only found many of the previous violations uncorrected, they also encountered numerous new violations: no emergency procedures or safety training for handling ethanol, formaldehyde, or radioactive compounds like Cobalt-60; disposal of used virus syringes in penetrable containers; no vaccinations for employees; improper storage of compressed gas cylinders; unlabeled and mislabeled hazardous chemical containers; no protection against carcinogen exposure; and no safety training for handling blood-borne virus and bacterial pathogens. OSHA apportioned the blame for the 124 new violations between the USDA and private contractor Burns & Roe. Of those, Plum Island was cited with 67 “Serious” violations, those which can lead directly to death or serious injury. Burns & Roe was ordered to pay $54,375 in punitive fines; those costs were ultimately borne by their client, the U.S. government. As a repeat offender, the USDA should have warranted—at the very least—a heavy fine. Yet because it was a sister government agency, OSHA could not legally fine or shut down Plum Island, like it would any private business. Instead, the USDA’s entire penalty for 67 potentially fatal safety violations—an immense 263 violations overall—was a letter listing the violations sent to the secretary of agriculture’s office.
When asked about the OSHA violations, Dr. Breeze scoffs. “The OSHA thing is a rat to me, I think. What does it really mean? The exit sign needs to be above the door, there isn’t a sign warning this or that. When people think of OSHA, they think of small children next to rotating circular saw blades or furnaces, but it’s usually not like that. It’s like a vehicle inspection—people find bits and pieces and they need to get things changed, but they’re not structurally very important.” [what an ass this guy was DC]
Though the USDA’s fellow government agencies investigated Plum Island and meted out punishments, nearly all of it was deflected. After all, Plum Island was not a private company that could be closed—neither the EPA nor OSHA had the authority to shut down the USDA. So a harsh reality ruled on Plum Island. The federal government was brazenly ignoring its own laws.
If the first round of whistleblowing was limited in its effectiveness, the second round held great potential. Current and former employees called every media outlet they could think of. They told reporters about herds of deer roaming the island, and a doe and her two fawns being gunned down by soldiers in Army Blackhawk helicopters, and about an employee who caught Nairobi sheep disease.
A media siege erupted. CNN and ABC, Newsday and the New York Times, national and local reporters all bombarded Plum Island for information on the allegations. Their faces blurred and voices distorted, workers sat before television cameras and told what they knew.
CNN ran a report with footage of Pete Swenson, a former Plum Island safety technician who left the area in disgust and moved to Virginia. Seated next to his wife at his kitchen table, the stocky, middle-aged Swenson told a harrowing tale. Outdoors he had been bitten on the leg by a horsefly and scratched the bite, thinking nothing of it. He entered Lab 257 to decontaminate a room that held animals infected with Nairobi sheep disease. Days later, his leg swelled and ulcerated, and he developed severe flu like symptoms. His illness got so bad he checked into the Long Island Veterans’ Hospital. Swenson told the attending doctor where he worked and that he suspected he had contracted Nairobi sheep disease, at which point a foreign disease specialist was brought in. According to Swenson, the specialist told him, “That disease is not here in the U.S.—I’m not sure how you could have it.” Swenson recovered, but not without a memento for his troubles: CNN cameras focused on an oval-shaped scar about two inches wide, burnished deep into in the middle of his left calf. When reporters asked Dr. Jerry Crawford (a new Plum Island official handling the media) if Swenson had been infected, he replied, “Probably, no.” Possibly, they asked? “Possibly—yes. Some of the diseases— humans can catch a form of it, and get flu like symptoms.”
Two stories involved more disturbing occurrences. In the winter of 1992, three cardboard boxes filled with biological samples blew off the back of the ferry into heavy seas. An emergency call went over the radio that morning, and a special boat crew was called to duty. A captain and two able-bodied seamen plowed back and forth through Plum Gut, and then around Plum Island’s perimeter, looking for the missing cargo. An island official called off the search after only a few runs. The three boxes were never recovered. Three employees confirm the accident. “What if it didn’t sink?” says one of them, shaking his head. “What if some kid hooked it on his fishing pole? What if it floated to a beach in Southampton, or Sag Harbor, or Montauk?” The germs were taken away by the currents, bobbing up and down inside a Styrofoam cushion inside a cardboard box. But management didn’t seem too concerned. “ ‘Nah, don’t worry about it,’ they said to us—‘Don’t worry about it.’ ”
The second most damning incident had scores of dead birds lying outside Laboratory 101. This allegation had a document written by Dr. Breeze that went along with it: Concerns have been raised about dead seagulls in the Lab 101 light court. The most recently dead bird was frozen by Burns & Roe and has been passed to Lab 257 for pathological examination....I would ask that Lab 257 confirm that infectious agents used in Labs 101 and 257 are not avian bird pathogens...and report on postmortem findings in this bird.
“Seagulls used to land on the 101 roof all the time, with no problem,” says one employee. “We have contractors building all over the place, including on top of the roof. Then, all of a sudden, these birds are dying, and they didn’t attribute it to anything.” Fearing a problem, a contractor presented one of the birds to Dr. Breeze with a memorandum for the record. “It’s the fox watching the chicken coop,” the employee says of Plum Island’s self analysis of a biological containment leak. “Take the seagulls and bring them to someone who doesn’t have an agenda.” Asked about the event, a USDA official said, “The veterinary pathologists on Plum Island are about the best around. They’ll find out what killed the birds.” Under the Freedom of Information Act, a request was made for the results of the “postmortem findings” on the nine birds reputedly autopsied (sources indicate there were many more dead birds). As of this writing, the USDA has refused to respond.
When the gaggle of news reporters first learned of Plum Island’s many woes from the disgruntled mob, they turned to the island’s director for answers. Dr. Roger Breeze told the New York Times they had the wrong guy. “I’m not responsible for the operation of the support services and facilities at Plum Island,” he told them. As one knowledgeable source says, “Breeze had thought, ‘Whoa, wait a second here—I did all this work for USDA, got this lab built in four years when they couldn’t over the last twenty-five, and now I’m taking the heat?’ And that is when they brought in Crawford. He was the fall guy to take the flak.”
Enter Dr. Claude G. “Jerry” Crawford. Breeze’s moves to divide and conquer Plum Island had met with plenty of controversy and criticism; he had somehow earned a reprieve from this next fiasco, the Plum Island Workers’ Rebellion. Washington granted him cover in the form of the forty-nine-year-old Jerry Crawford, a USDA career man previously working in Peoria, Illinois, whose specialty was crop seeds. Many suspected an ulterior motive for giving Crawford the newly created position of deputy area director, or “DAD,” as he was known in correspondence (and referred to derisively by the workforce). The plan was to have Breeze do research full time, while letting DAD “run the buildings”—another way of saying “take the flak.”
Ed Hollreiser remembers Crawford’s first day on Plum Island. “When he came in, he gave this big speech to all of us, where he explained his whole background, and how it was on plant research, and how it had nothing to do with animal research. Then he discussed the vacations he took to Europe with his wife. Meanwhile, half of us are about to lose our jobs.” Crawford was a master of malapropism. When asked about cost overruns, he said, “There are no golden toilet seats on Plum Island.” Asked about all the safety problems under Dr. Breeze, he said, “We don’t search handbags or strip search. I believe we can show [security] is warranted for the type of research we do here. We’re not making nuclear bombs.” And when asked about the OSHA violations, he noted it took six months for the safety agency to issue the violations and said, “If these violations had been life-threatening or extremely hazardous to employee safety, one would think OSHA would have done something immediately.” Then realizing what he had said, Crawford added, “Uh, I don’t mean to say these violations are not important. . . .” Finally, when asked about the consequences of an employee’s refusing experimental, non-FDA–approved vaccines, “We will try to find another position. If we don’t have one, they will be terminated. Simple as that.”
When it came to public relations—ostensibly the reason he was on Plum Island—a running joke was that Crawford himself had been infected by the virus that caused foot-in-mouth disease. One top Breeze administration official said, “We all independently formed our own opinion of Crawford’s capabilities in a relatively short period of time, and realized the man was a complete fool.”
Dr. Breeze, spared this particular media feeding frenzy, says the media issues were handled terribly. “It was very reactive.” Another adjective he uses is “comical.” In fact, John Boyle recalls Breeze “sitting in the bleachers, laughing his ass off on that one.”1 Within the next year, the USDA transferred Dr. Crawford to a position near Washington. On his way out, he told a local reporter, “My goal, by opening the island up to the press, was to show the people that we were good neighbors.”
1 Realizing the dearth of Crawford’s PR savvy, USDA headquarters begged Breeze to speak to a New York Times reporter to cool things down, and the two hit it off. That reporter ultimately became Dr. Breeze’s second wife.
RAW SEWAGE, RECYCLED
“If you flush it or drink it, it comes to me.”
“Joe Zeliff” worked in Building 102, the wastewater decontamination chamber for Lab 101, known to those on the inside as “The Big Shithouse” (Lab 257’s chamber was the “Little” one). One of Joe’s responsibilities included pulling liquid samples from the sewage tanks after they went through the decon process—that is, after the goo had snaked through a series of tubes that heated it up to 214 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour. The samples were handed over to the safety officers, who would inject them into test animals to ensure that systems in Building 102 were operating correctly. It was crude safety, but it worked.
For years, Joe would prepare a safety sample each Thursday morning. He doesn’t pull samples now. “We haven’t done that, well, since Breeze came in,” Joe says. Now, Joe has no idea whether the liquid waste coming out of Building 102 is alive or dead.
“They’ve recently added new gauges, but I don’t think even those gauges read right.” Sometimes the low temperature alarm rings at 203 degrees Fahrenheit on the new system; other times it goes off at 198 degrees, and still other times it buzzes at 206 degrees, the temperature which is supposed to set it off. Sometimes he doesn’t get a low temperature alarm, like the one time he realized too late that the heat exchangers had failed and the sewage went through cold. The old system had ten tiny heat probes inside the booster, heat exchange, and retention tubes that relayed the temperatures within up to the control panel. The new system only has two temperature readings: going in and coming out.
When Joe and other operators in Building 102 hear the low temperature alarm, they are first supposed to shut the system down. Then they gradually bring it back up to 214 degrees, and only then do they restart the pumps. But it doesn’t work that way. Why not? “Because frankly, it’s a pain in the ass—you’d be shutting the entire system down every single day, every fifteen minutes. It’s not that the operators don’t want to do it. It’s just that the gauges malfunction constantly.” The tanks, including the 27,000- gallon main tank (“You could honestly get lost inside it,” says Joe. “It’s the size of my house”) have large cold spots, like when one swims in a warm lake and hits a chilly pocket of water. In these cold slugs, billions of viruses and bacteria stay alive through the contaminated sewage treatment.
A February 1993 incident form noted a “critical alarm sewage spill” in Building 102. Joe remembers, “I was directly involved with this.” Since the building opened in 1956, the plant had always run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But the private contractor ran it only ten hours a day. “The collection process will be unattended, with 100 percent reliance upon the automatic and emergency collection equipments,” stated an internal USDA letter on this decision. “They did it to save money,” says Joe, shaking his head in disgust. “What else?”
One winter night, an operator left his shift after recording the 27,000 gallon No. 2 tank as only 7,000 gallons full. High winds and rough sea conditions prevented the next shift from getting to the island the following day, so it remained unattended. When the weather finally calmed, the shift operator opened the door to Building 102 and came upon a putrid smell—something had gone terribly wrong in the tank area. A single 1,000-pound cow excretes from 75 to 115 pounds of manure a day, and a single 200-pound pig, 35 to 65 pounds; it isn’t hard to see how quickly raw, infected sewage accumulates on Plum Island each day. Second only to the incinerator charging room, Building 102 is the biologically “hottest” area, and is therefore kept painstakingly clean. On a normal day, “that building is as clean as a whistle,” says Joe. “It is cleaner than my house—you could eat off the floor in there.” But that morning, the operator and his assistant, who came upon the large pool of gushing brown mess, were gagging within seconds for clean air. “I saw nothing but shit all over the place,” says the operator. “Raw, no decontamination, viruses and who knows what—everywhere.” The men witnessed a macabre sight: a continuous flow of contaminated sewage, vomiting out of the overflow valve, after being pumped from the No. 2 tank, through a daisy chain of pipes. Underneath the pool of sewage, fluid was emptying into the floor drains, where sump pumps sent it back into the No. 2 tank; from there, it cycled through again. “We were essentially recycling raw sewage,” says Joe. First, the men processed some contaminated sewage out to make room in the tanks. Then, donning Tyvek protective jumpsuits, hip boots, and face respirators, they drained and mopped up the mess, flushing the room down with Roccal solution. Research in Lab 101 seized up for two days. “They couldn’t so much as flush a toilet in 101, because we couldn’t handle it in 102.”
The spill form cautions its reader “NOTE: This bldg. was UNMANNED for 32 hrs.” Under the old way of doing things, it would have been manned—the overnight shift would have worked overtime on the island through the next day and ridden out the storm. Of course, it would have cost more money than running Building 102 at one 10-hour shift per day. Joe observes, “See, the contractor said, ‘We need more money to pay for more men.’ The government said, ‘We’re not paying you any more money,’ and the contractor said, ‘If you’re not paying us, we’re not putting operators in there twenty-four hours and you’re going to have another spill.’ ” At this time, the contractor’s vice president of operations told a reporter that safety on Plum Island was “really governed by the client,” and his client—the USDA—was under “very serious budget constraints.” Another executive privately admitted exactly where his company stood, saying, “We can’t staff the facility to the level we’d like to.”
This round-robin routine is a prime example of why certain government functions at Plum Island should be kept in federal hands, and ought not be privatized.
TURTLES AND GEESE
After exiting Building 102, effluent travels to the nearby wastewater treatment plant, which uses a process called activated sludge. It enters a pond at about 150 degrees (assuming Building 102 is functioning properly), and aerators froth the fluid up like a bubbly hot tub. The hard stuff drops to the bottom and a set of six-foot-long weirs skim the “cream” off the top and push it into a clarifier, where more settling takes place. The bacteria are routed back into the aeration tank, and the remaining cream goes under a set of ultraviolet photochemical radiation lamps before being pumped into Plum Island Harbor, which empties into Plum Gut, whose waters disperse north into the Long Island Sound, and south to the Hamptons. The cream used to be chlorinated, but was replaced with UV lights to cut costs.2
2 The jury is still out on which method of final treatment, chlorine or UV radiation, is preferable. While chlorine is considered highly toxic to marine life, UV radiation may not be inactivating all of the billions of viruses and bacteria contained in sewage. UV is far cheaper than using chlorine, which must be replenished regularly.
The most troubling part of this whole process is found at the end of the pipe. Despite the particularly hazardous content of the Plum Island wastewater treatment plant’s outfall, it is tested monthly, no different than any other municipal sewage plant. Following New York State and EPA laws, Plum Island tests for suspended solids and coliforms. Coliforms are harmless bacteria, not normally in water, but found in warm-blooded mammals. The presence of fecal coliform bacteria in the water is a bellwether for other microbes; that is, it indicates that the water contains many other bacteria and viruses not being tested, including harmful disease-causing germs. When traced back to a municipal sewage plant, this means the water is transmitting typhoid fever, diphtheria, hepatitis, dysentery, gastroenteritis, or other domestic virus and bacteria infections. High levels of fecal coliform out of the exotic animal germ labs on Plum Island present a unique and highly dangerous situation.
For water to be acceptable for swimming, it should have fewer than 200 colonies of coliforms per 100 milliliters of water sampled; fewer than 1,000 colonies are acceptable for fishing and boating.3 Plum Island’s legally permissible limit is 700 colonies per day. Required by law to be tested once a month, Plum Island’s coliform levels were above that limit for seven months during a twelve-month span between 1996 and 1997. In October 1996 and March 1997, the levels tested at 900 colonies, well over acceptable standards for swimming in the waters of the Hamptons, America’s elite summer playground. But that was the best of it. Other monthly counts ranged from 1,000 to 6,000. And during one fateful month, February 1997, Plum Island spewed out an enormous 23,000 colonies per 100 milliliters sampled—115 times higher than the acceptable limit for swimming, 33 times higher than the island’s legally permissible limit, and 23 times higher than the fishing and boating limit. Additional documents show this was not a fluke. Back in 1990 and 1991, Plum Island’s fecal coliform counts held steady in the 2,000 range—three times the legal limit—and peaked to a shocking 20,000 during four separate monthly testing periods. Plum Island has been—and still is—flushing deadly exotic animal viruses along with the standard typhoid and diphtheria germs into coastal waters enjoyed by millions of people.
3 These are generous thresholds. Vermont, for example, sets 77 colonies of fecal coliform as that state’s acceptable maximum level for swimming.
In 1999, hundreds of thousands of lobsters in Long Island Sound mysteriously died, causing the New York–Connecticut lobster harvest to fall off virtually 100 percent that year. The die-off, which ended New York’s reign as the nation’s second largest lobster-producing state (behind only Maine), prompted the federal government to declare the event a “marine resource disaster.” Researchers pinpointed a parasitic paramoeba that kills off nerve tissue and a bacterial infection that causes “shell disease” as culprits, as well as large amounts of malathion from the 1999 West Nile virus pesticide sprayings seeping into the Long Island Sound. Surprisingly, no scientific efforts have been made to study the link between the two microbes and the fouled sewage flowing out of Plum Island.
Dr. Floyd Horn, the official in charge of all USDA research, said in 1998, “We’re not polluting the sound in any way. We heat the discharge to sterilize it and it goes into a treatment plant before it goes into the sound.” But one employee extensively involved with the process has a different response. “That stuff wasn’t killed off in the old system, and I’m not sure it’s killed off in the new system.” When the New York Observer questioned Dr. Jerry Crawford about the high levels of fecal coliform, he answered, “The location where the samples are taken has a tremendous number of turtles and geese.... They shit in the aeration pond . . . the shit has E. coli in it. Normal sewage treatment plants don’t have animals.”
Building 102 and the Plum Island wastewater treatment plant are not performing their critical functions. Instead, they pump thousands of gallons of virus- and bacteria-contaminated waste into the water. Consider this: a single bacterium that replicates itself in twenty minutes will be, within twelve hours, the parent of 16,777,216 new offspring. And that’s just a single germ out of billions and billions that make their way out of Plum Island each day. [I cannot believe they are going to put the Islands replacement in Kansas,it's like a bad wizard of oz bad joke DC]
PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE
After the EPA came down on Plum Island, an environmental company came over and drilled a number of monitoring wells twenty feet down in which it installed a pipe with a cap. Every month, “Steve Bosley” totes his collecting buckets and portable pump from well to well, unscrewing each cap and carefully snaking clear tubing about sixteen feet down each pipe. He then switches on the pump—“p-p-p-p-p-p-p”—which brings up what’s been accumulating way below the island’s surface. “I’m still pulling oil out of the wells,” Steve tells me. “I’m supposed to pull the sample until I run clear water. I’ve been running about four and a half gallons of No. 2 and No. 6 oil before I run clear water.” The No. 2 oil oozing out of Plum Island’s sandy underground is essentially diesel engine fuel; the No. 6 oil has the viscosity of tar. “Yes, I would say it runs pure oil for four gallons, then it turns creamy, then to white, then to swamp gas, then almost clear.”
Steve surmises, “We’ve had a bunch of busted pipes and leaking tanks. The oil must have permeated the whole ground.” He isn’t exaggerating. A 1992 internal USDA memorandum from the assistant secretary of agriculture notes “Over 40 underground storage tanks.... Most of these tanks are probably at least 30 years old. While tests of the drinking water have not indicated any problems to date, this could change overnight.” The memo urged action “as soon as possible,” but seven years later, nothing’s changed. The oil pockets below Plum Island coexist with pockets of clay and sand, as well as aquifers, or vast pockets of fresh water from which people obtain their drinking water through fourteen shallow wells. The aquifers, and other liquids like oil, do not remain fixed in one place. They move and often merge, according to geology experts. One drop of oil, dabbed on a blade of grass in the center of Long Island, will travel south and reach the Atlantic Ocean within twenty-five years. The pockets of oil Steve pumps from a well that’s sampling only a tiny portion will do the same thing. “That oil, in my opinion, is going to take the path of least resistance, go through the sand to the potable water,” says Steve.
THE GRAVY TRAIN
One of the ways Dr. Breeze kept his prized scientific recruits happy was through special non-salary compensation. For example, during overnights and weekends, a scientist would be stationed on the island as a duty officer to respond to animal or human emergencies. During the Callis era, duty officers were paid $60 for a weeknight and $160 for the weekend. “Basically, if there was a problem in the lab, you had to go in there, turn off a centrifuge, move stuff from a freezer or drop feed down the chute to the critters [test animals],” explains Dr. Carol House. But under Breeze, new scientists were assigned duty officer shifts and paid “some $600 to $700 a weekend to get in on the gravy train,” says one scientist. The role went from being the most dreaded to the most coveted.
“Danny Clewis” remembers a problem that occurred in Lab 257. Around 2:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, an alarm rang in the control room: the Box 6 freezer had gone down. As one of the overnight building operators, Danny went into the containment corridor to check on Box 6, and found the compressor shot and the freezer all but cooked. Normally stored at minus 158 degrees Fahrenheit, biologicals have to be shifted from the broken icebox into other freezers quickly or the germs will start to get pesky. Danny phoned the duty officer and told him Box 6 was out. “Well, he got very ornery with me,” says Danny, describing the reaction on the other end of the line. “He didn’t want to come down to assess the situation. He yelled at me that I woke him up and told me to do it myself.” Tact isn’t one of Danny Clewis’s strong points, because he shot back, “Listen, buddy, this is your responsibility, not ours—and you’re messing with the wrong guy.” He was right. Operating the building’s negative airflow systems and steam plant was Danny’s domain, but when it came to viruses and germs, they all looked the same to him.
The duty officer then asked, “Well, what do we usually do in this situation?”
“ ‘What do we do?’ I asked him back.” “What I do is usually call you— the duty officer, for Christ’s sake!”
The duty officer slogged down to Lab 257, and the two of them began unloading the contents of Box 6 to transfer them into other freezers. But it wasn’t all that easy. “We had biologicals in that freezer that were frozen and dated in the 1950s,” Danny recalls. “We opened the door and about half of them fell onto the floor.” Luckily, only a few tubes and flasks broke on the tile floor and spilled their contents; a Roccal disinfectant solution was brought in for the kill. The move then faced another obstacle—the other freezers were already overcrowded. One freezer was literally bursting at the seams with germs, so Danny wedged a two- by four-inch beam of plywood between it and a wall to keep its door shut. Each freezer has an attached log that records the exact contents of the materials kept inside. But Danny noticed the duty officer, all hot and bothered from being woken in the first place, haphazardly separating the carefully grouped test tubes and stuffing them into whatever freezer open space he could find. Without logging any of them. “He’s the boss,” Danny said to himself and shrugged.
Three weeks later, Danny got a phone call. “This one scientist wants to know where everything is, particularly all his samples. How the hell am I supposed to know? I told him to call up the duty officer from that night.”
The stories that circulated turned out to be more than grumbles of disgruntled workers. The facts proved that the USDA was grossly negligent, the workforce had looked the other way for years, and the public had been in the dark—in short, it proved that Plum Island was in disgraceful shape. Though some said the disclosures to the EPA, OSHA, and the news media were unwarranted, other workers and scientists believed the door needed to be opened wide. One employee laid his thinking bare when he explained, “You have to understand. If somebody took all this away from you, what would you do? You would be really pissed off and annoyed— you wouldn’t take a little revenge? I covered up for these people for years, and it would have cost them millions then. So I—and all the others—blew the whistle.” Says the former union leader Ed Hollreiser, “I never had a vendetta to close Plum Island down, but I wanted it run right. The contractor took shortcuts to save money, made more profits, and got lean, but then safety was compromised. Safety doesn’t need to be lean—it needs to be fat.”
For all the whistleblowers’ efforts in bringing these dreadful conditions to light, Plum Island remained—and remains—a real biological and environmental hazard.
Next
Meltdown
No longer would the tail wag the dog. To Breeze and his man Boyle, the primary need was not support, but rather Plum Island’s pièce de résistance, its holy grail: the science. Without science, there could be no glory. “The IRC was outrageous—it was 78 percent [of Plum Island’s yearly budget] when we got there.” At a normal lab, Boyle says, it would be in the low twenties. To improve science and keep the island from being shut down? “Shave the IRC down to a bare minimum,” says Boyle. No longer would engineering and plant management be the Golden Cow that got whatever it wanted. Boyle sharpened his pencil and got to number crunching, putting in late nights and seven-day workweeks, huddled over stacks of spreadsheets and financial data. With a stroke of his pencil, he slashed the animal supply contract and whittled down oil and new vehicle purchases. Next, he started counting up all the widgets—electric saws, toilet paper, circuit breakers, circuit boards, soap, hammers, nails, light bulbs—and figured out where costs were coming from. “We bought thirty items, used twelve, and they reported six in inventory,” he recalls. “People were carrying stuff off the island on Sundays, typical stuff people try to steal from the government—except here, they were doing it wholesale.”1 He installed a phone switchboard that provided reports of outgoing calls. “The day after I announced that one, there were cries I was violating people’s privacy.” But it worked—the monthly Plum Island phone bill plummeted in just one month from $7,000 to $3,000.
1
On one occasion—after seeing numerous instances of employees walking off the ferry on quiet Sunday
afternoons with large boxes under their arms, dashing for their cars—Boyle spotted three men hauling a
large machine off the ferry into a van. Rubbing his eyes in disbelief, he looked out the window again and
swore; his hard work was again being undermined right before his eyes. Exclaiming, “That’s it! I am not
putting up with this anymore,” he charged out of the warehouse toward the trio when one of the boat crew
grabbed his arm and stopped him, saying, “Whoa, wait, John, you don’t have to—they’re just borrowing
that. It’ll be back in a few days—you’ll see.” The big machine was a floor-washer and the employees were
taking it off to wash down the Greenport VFW hall, something they were doing every six months or so.But that was only child’s play compared to what he did next. Within a After that episode, employees knew better than to mess around with the new budget director. “Roger says tact and diplomacy are not my strong suits,” says Boyle.
“John, I am hiring a doctor and I need an X-ray crystallography machine,” Breeze told Boyle early on. “It costs half a million dollars—now go find me the money for it.” Coming up with that kind of dough stumped even the uncanny number cruncher, who had just completed chiseling together a budget. He tore the whole thing apart again and found Breeze another $500,000, securing a renowned doctor’s transfer to Plum Island. “He was very demanding to work for,” Boyle says, smiling fondly, relishing working on the Breeze dream team. “I had to pull a string here and there and unravel it all and put it back together—and of course I found the money.” But from where had it come?
“If you watch the pennies,” Boyle’s parents had taught him growing up in hardscrabble Dorchester, an Irish Catholic inner-city Boston neighborhood, “the dollars will take care of themselves.” Now he was watching nickels and dimes, too, and to Breeze’s delight. “We cut a substantial amount of money,” says Boyle. “We cut well over a million dollars.” He believes even more could have been slashed. After six years on the job, says Boyle, “I still didn’t know where all the waste was. There was still some shit going on that I couldn’t put my finger on—which tormented me to no end.”
With the budget in Boyle’s capable hands, Breeze next brightened up the physical appearance of the laboratories, taking special interest in the toilets. “Nobody had cleaned these rest rooms—there would be no toilet paper, and the sinks were filthy. I wasn’t prepared to live with people not doing their job. Everything at Plum depends upon a handful of scientists who are pulling the train.” At a minimum, those scientists had to have sparkling bathrooms, perhaps the most basic of all provisions. “I had to completely remove all of the furniture in the toilets because it was so bad—so dirty—it couldn’t be cleaned.” Breeze ordered brand-new porcelain, metalwork fixtures, shiny faucets, and gleaming tile, and refinished the rest rooms. Then he explicitly set forth the frequency and manner in which they were to be cleaned. He also conducted unannounced spot checks throughout the week to ensure full compliance.2 “It was a personal tour de force,” Breeze gloats.
2 Director Breeze also took a similar interest with the hallway floors. In a moment of candor, he said to me, “It’s kind of silly when you hear a scientist talk about the hallways—is it waxed, is it shiny—why would you give a damn? But you are not going to create a top-class facility if you are only top-class about one thing.”
But that was only child’s play compared to what he did next.Within a year, the new administration had become a lean and mean machine, deaf to the rants and raves of the support staff and their supposed needs.3 So when Walter Sinowski, the building foreman of Lab 257, told them in early 1991 that an emergency backup power cable needed repair, management had a different answer this time around: no.
3 All the deep cost-cutting apparently didn’t extend to the creature comforts enjoyed by Dr. Breeze’s cabal. Boyle first worked in the Orient Point office, but Breeze soon moved him onto Plum Island. “He put me in possibly the best quarters on Plum Island,” remembers Boyle. “Talk about an Irish promotion!” From his desk in the old Army jail, he gazed through an all-glass solarium and viewed the parade ground and aqua blue waters beyond. He complained to Breeze that the greenhouse effect made the office unbearably hot. “I told him it might be seen as elitist if I install an air conditioner, and he said, ‘Yes, John, it will—but do it anyway.’ So I put a big-ass 12,000-BTU unit in there—and E&PM [engineering and plant management] didn’t like that at all.”
Soon after taking over the reins, Breeze set out to acquaint himself with the island’s three hundred daytime inhabitants. “When he first came in, we really thought he might be one of us,” says one worker. Whereas Jerry Callis wore a suit and tie to work each morning, Dr. Breeze scarcely looked like a doctor, let alone the director. Sporting a plaid shirt and jeans and smiling broadly, Breeze was slapping workers on the back as if they were old friends. Veteran employee Martin Weinmiller recalls Breeze coming ashore on his first day. Heading home after the graveyard shift, Weinmiller watched the ferry bearing the new director tie up at the harbor dock. “He walks off the boat, and looks out at the island for a time. Then he says, ‘Either I’m going to make this place or I’m going to break it.’ ”
Easing himself quite comfortably into the chair occupied by Dr. Callis for decades, Breeze quickly set the tone with employees with his newsletter, the Plum Island Diary:
I am sure that the last many months have been very frustrating and disheartening.... This Center is not going to close, we are not moving to another location....Together, we are going to plan and build the next proud 35 years of our history.
The impression potential recruits gain of [Plum Island] must be diminished by the shabby state of most of our buildings and grounds resulting from years of neglect—and I know that our loyal E&PM [engineering and plant maintenance] staff who have tried so hard to do so much must also be discouraged.
If we complain about federal salaries, crumbling buildings, and bureaucratic inertia, it should be no surprise that people lost interest in working here. Let’s be proud of what we do and speak positively wherever we can.
Those with problems and suggested solutions can help me more than those with problems alone.... Thanks for your input in advance.
The whispers began: Hey, look out for this guy. When Jerry Callis looked out upon his island from his office perched over the Army parade ground, he saw an honorable band of three hundred loyal, dedicated employees. Breeze saw support staff and veteran scientists as a motley gang of serfs, a drain on science funds that did little more than punch the clock and collect an oversized paycheck.
In Breeze’s first big move, he fired three scientists and forced a fourth into early retirement. He called the African swine fever virus team from the lab to his office and told them they had two weeks to pack up and leave. They were dumbfounded. “We had experiments with years of work gone into them,” says Dr. Richard Endris. “With Roger, there was no kinder, gentler way,” said another source. The team complained to the swine industry and the local congressman that taxpayers’ work was “going down the tubes.” That bought them a six-month reprieve. But once that time was up, Drs. Endris, Jerry Pan, Gertrude Schloer, and their leader, Bill Hess—a forty-year Plum Island veteran—were out on their rears. “He’s seen fit to change directions,” the seventy-two-year-old Dr. Hess drily told a reporter, “which is his privilege.”
In Breeze’s opinion, the four scientists were repeating the same science, or as one Breeze official said, “Reinventing the wheel, over and over again,” testing viruses on one tick species after another. Said the official of the sacked four, “They were the worst of the worst—one of them hadn’t published a research paper in nine years. Another one hadn’t written one in five years. Sat there on their dead asses leaning on their elbows. They knew it was coming.”
Contrary to what others said, Dr. Endris and Dr. Hess had published scientific papers in recent years. Breeze’s reasoning that it was time for a genetically engineered vaccine for African swine fever made little sense to Endris, who says African swine fever antibody proteins (like Dr. Bachrach’s VP3) just didn’t have the prophylactic properties necessary. “[Breeze] did not understand the biology of it, didn’t have the grasp of it— but he didn’t let that get in the way of his politics.” Ironically, Endris was one of those few on Plum Island who thought Dr. Callis’s departure might be a good thing. A new director could rejuvenate the crumbling laboratory and reinvigorate its mission, he thought. Now he knew just how wrong he was. “Personally, after I saw what replaced [Callis],” he admits fifteen years later, “I wish he had stayed.”
Breeze then confronted the remaining scientists. Sitting them all down, he berated them with facts and figures—the number of test animals purchased compared to the number of scientific papers produced. The number wasn’t nearly high enough and the few papers published were terrible. “This was really sad,” Dr. Jim House would growl years later. “The part that’s bothersome is that he tried to play down the accomplishments of those who had been there before him—not one time, but numerous times. He tried to make their accomplishments look petty.”
There was another reason the scientists were pushed out—to make room in the budget for a new ferry.
MELTING SNOWBALLS
IN THE ANTARCTIC
Just when it seemed like things were clicking into place—the budget being
tightened, unwanted scientists pushed overboard, and new equipment for
new scientists under requisition—the roof caved in. Or rather, the dock
caved in. The ubiquitous autumn storms that pounded Plum Island
smashed the harbor dock to pieces. The $700,000 cost to replace the bulkhead blew a hole straight through Boyle’s crafty budget and jeopardized
monies earmarked for the new crystallographers, spectrographs, and electron microscopes. Washington told Breeze that Plum Island had to pay for
the repair, putting him in the unenviable position of reneging on promises
to his recruits. Says Breeze, “That would be like telling recruits at Columbia University, ‘I can’t buy your scientific equipment for you, because I
have to go fix a piece of West 168th Street.’ They would look at you like
you were crazy.” With the dock standing in the way of scientific glory, he
had to do something. In its long history, the secretary of agriculture’s advisory committee, made up of representatives from livestock industries, had never met outside of Washington, D.C. Breeze proposed to Washington that the committee meet this year in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, to see Plum Island. As a friendly gesture to their new exotic disease lab director, the aggies agreed to organize it—but on one condition: he would not, under any circumstances, ask the committee for money. “The Department was going to put $1 million into the island and that was going to be it—and I was not to ask them [for any more],” says Breeze.
They all came out one morning—the National Cattlemen’s Association, the Pork Producers’ Council, and the dairy and poultry associations— all the groups that had a multibillion-dollar stake in what some might label “corporate welfare.” Plum Island had always been painted as essential to the American people—wholesome, apple pie research to protect the food supply, defensive research that private industry just wouldn’t do. But when the twenty dark suits crowded onto a boat bound for Plum Island with “Cap’n” Breeze, the scene looked less vital to the taxpaying public than to the billion-dollar agribusiness conglomerates the captain’s passengers represented.4
4 A few years later, Tom Cook, president of the National Cattlemen’s Association, would tell the New York Times that when it came to Plum Island, “Our bottom line . . . is we want to see the most dollars made available for research.”
In evangelical tones, Dr. Breeze walked and talked the group through the deteriorating laboratory, preaching how he planned to shore up its crumbling foundations, rid the place of the driftwood, clean the bathrooms, shine the floors, and bring science—glorious science. “He was very charming,” says one observer. “So charming he could melt snowballs in the Antarctic.” But meeting again the next day, the Pied Piper’s smile had turned down at its corners. He talked hard and fast at them in his distinct accent.
“This place is never going to fly. You can’t keep doing this business with the island falling down. We need $40 million here. We need it. I’m delivering the program, I’m hiring the people—but it won’t work without $40 million.” Breeze had previously been told by his engineers that it would cost about $25 million in total to repair the island into tip-top shape. He paused and looked at them, head cocked for effect.
“Now if you don’t want to do it, that’s fine—and we’ll all walk away. No problem—I’ll go find another job.” But heads in front of him were nodding. We’re with you, Roger, we are—we are!
They were. Thumbing his nose at his superiors, Breeze had secured, in a matter of days, a construction program that Plum Island had failed to get under way for decades. The livestock groups got behind it, and leaned heavily on reluctant USDA officials and Congress to give way. Though infuriated with their insubordinate new director, there was little Washington could do about it. How did his superiors respond? “Well,” says Breeze, smiling, “everybody changes. If there was no money, it was all over, and they might as well have known that. You cannot make bricks without clay.” Breeze soon had $22 million of clay in his hands ($3 million shy of his personal goal, but still enough) to build some 58,000 square feet of new space and renovate another 45,000 square feet. It was a truly remarkable feat.
Successful in dividing Washington officials from their industry advisory group, he trained his sights on the island, and on how to grab the animal kingdom for himself.
Long Island’s North Fork was far too remote a place to attract good scientists, said Breeze. The cost of living there was far too high for government-salaried postdocs. Opportunities for spouses were also limited, except maybe to wait tables or work retail cash registers. As far as raising children, some scientists thought the school system fell short. “You’d have to go way up the Island to find any real sophistication,” says one. And another, “The area is dead . . . it is not the type of place to attract young, upwardly mobile professionals. God knows how many miles you are from the nearest quality health care.” Locals couldn’t fill the scientific need, Breeze believed; they lacked the requisite education and experience. Recruiting would soundly fail. The laboratory would indeed fall into the sea, and with it would go Cap’n Breeze.
But there was a solution. By running a ferry across the Sound to Connecticut, Breeze could provide the scientists with a better place to live, one with a lower cost of living and better schools and real employment opportunities for spouses. At the same time, Plum Island would be connected with the Amtrak station there, allowing a link to universities like Yale and the University of Connecticut. “This ferry will turn Plum Island around,” the new director boldly predicted. “It will help make us the number one research center in the world.”
The Connecticut ferry’s first customer was none other than Director Roger Breeze. He moved with his wife and children to a house in Cheshire. “I had to be on [the Connecticut boat],” he said. “It doesn’t matter to me where I live. I just didn’t think people would take it seriously without me being there.”5 The ferry’s heaviest load was a mere seven or eight passengers. Former ferry engineer Ed Hollreiser says the boat often ferried a single passenger. Once, one of the new scientists Dr. Breeze recruited (all of whom “chose” Connecticut as their place of residence) realized he’d forgotten an important book while en route to the island. The ferry was sent all the way back to Connecticut, where a deckhand went and fished the book out of the scientist’s trunk and brought it back—to the tune of $400 in marine fuel.
5 But Dr. Breeze didn’t even attempt to live on Long Island. The director lived alone on Plum Island in an old Army barracks until his family moved east from Washington State and joined him in Connecticut.
It was an open secret that new hires must hail from the Nutmeg State. “Anyone that wanted to work on Plum Island at that time—even on support staff—had to be from Connecticut,” says a worker. Among the scientists and support staff interviewed who ventured opinions on the ferry, all of them suspected Breeze’s wife was the motivation behind it. They say she disliked the countrified North Fork, and the closest university teaching positions for her were miles away at Stony Brook. With its many colleges and universities, Connecticut offered far better opportunities for her and the children. While all of this may be true, the director’s own motivations seemed far deeper than pleasing his wife.
As ridership on the Connecticut ferry increased, professional camaraderie at the laboratory began to decline. People were beginning to fraternize based upon which boat—and from which state—they hailed. The move “set up two classes on the island,” said Ed Hollreiser, “[Breeze’s] people from Connecticut and us peons from Long Island.” “I don’t have a personal problem with him,” notes Dr. Jim House. “But he caused a divisiveness between the New York and Connecticut people. He created the Connecticut people because to him, no one smart would live on [the New York] side. But for forty years it had worked without it.” Dr. Carol House agrees. “He would have conversations with people on the Connecticut boat that [the New York staff ] wouldn’t be privy to.”
The ferry was a top-of-the-line, luxurious $1.2 million, 540-horsepower, 110-foot-long boat—but there were flaws from the start. Hollreiser said there were design problems with the engines, and the exhaust noise ran afoul of local town ordinances. “It was like they bought a Yugo,” says a former worker. “The engines constantly blew up and it cost the government big dollars in repairs.” When they finally got the leaky, noisy, shuddering craft running, it cost a hefty $100,000 a year to operate—a significant chunk of funds for a “cost cutting” regime to bear.
Dr. Breeze maintains that “it had been difficult to fill jobs in the past,” but nothing in the records indicate that local hiring over the previous four decades had been problematic at all. As veteran Fran Demorest wrote, “The professional staff moved to Long Island, bought or built homes, raised their families and used our school systems. These families joined in the many local community activities, services, churches, and other programs.” Breeze’s detractors, large and small, would always say the Connecticut ferry was a colossal waste, a sham, all the way down to the nifty uniforms he dressed the marine crews in. Even the local congressman decried the move. “It sounds like a total waste of money,” snapped George Hochbrueckner, a Democrat representing New York’s First Congressional District. “It sounds like a few people—including Mr. Breeze—decided they wanted to live in Connecticut. The taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for this. . . . This does not make any sense to me.” But the USDA had paid for it, and the congressman’s objections were for naught.6
6 Hochbrueckner would tell the New York Times a few years later regarding the Connecticut ferry, “If we realized the situation earlier, I would have made a point... but now the die is cast... we’re too far downstream.”
Even had he tried, Hochbrueckner could never have reversed the ferry. Because Dr. Breeze saw to it that undoing his Connecticut boat would be akin to unscrambling eggs. In a masterstroke, he did the one thing that would grant his new ferry perpetuity. He lionized the one man whose name was inextricably entwined with Plum Island, invoking in a simple step the potent feelings of a warm and distant past that instantly hushed would-be critics.
He named the boat after Jerry Callis.
The opinions of two of his allies are enlightening. “Yes, it was Roger’s idea,” says John Boyle, when asked who named the Connecticut ferry. “In my heart of hearts, I would never tell you what my honest opinion of that particular thing is. There are still a few things about him I can’t quite figure out. He can be inscrutable—even to his closest friends.”
The definitive word comes from Dr. Breeze’s dear friend Dr. Robert Shope, with whom Breeze had lived after he legally separated from his first wife.7 “He lived in Connecticut and wanted the ferry for himself. The excuse was that it would bring in a broader group of scientists—and it was a very controversial move.” What did Shope think of the naming of the ferry? “It was very clever,” Shope mused. “The J. J. Callis—he had it painted on the boat before anybody knew it—[after that] you couldn’t take the boat away and nobody could counter the move.” For no other reason than his own self-interest, Breeze traded on the good will his revered predecessor’s good name, and in the process sliced the island’s workforce into two parts.
7 “He and I have had a very good social relationship,” says Dr. Shope, when asked about Roger Breeze. “I had separated from my wife and was living in Connecticut at the time and had a bachelor’s house. He knocked on my door one night and said, ‘Bob, do you have a spare room for me?’ And I said, ‘Yes, but I don’t have a bed in it.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry—I have a mattress in my car.’ This was at a time when he was having marital problems, and he lived with me for about three months. So I got to know him well.”
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
By this time, in the words of one observer, “Employees were praying that
Breeze would die and Callis would come back.” No longer was Dr. Breeze
the rustic faux Scot, turned backslapping American cowboy. He now
charged around the island with a flashy imperiousness. Says a retired Plum
Island engineer, “You know, a lot changed when Breeze came in. He
seemed real worried about climbing the ladder. He could care less about us
Americans—or American labor, for that matter. The island was all for his
own benefit. I remember one time, he was coming over on the early morning ferry, and we’d been coming off from the night shift. He shook his finger at Walt [Sinowski, Lab 257’s building foreman] and said, ‘I’m gonna get
your job. I’m gonna have your job one day. It’s not long now. Not long.’ “Meanwhile, Walt had been retired already from another job, and working at Plum was something he was good at and enjoyed doing. Walt said to him, ‘You can take it right now, Breeze. Go right ahead.’ We’d sit there and take that crap from him, day in and day out.
“And then one day—it happened. It really, truly happened.”
The A-76 federal privatization program had visited Plum Island two times since its inception in 1980. The rules stated the government had to step aside when the private sector could perform the government’s nonprofessional tasks, provided no “overriding factors” required the government to keep those functions federalized. On both previous occasions, Dr. Callis invoked the “overriding factors” exception and staved off privatization, arguing that Plum Island functions were far too sensitive to be contracted out. Placing two high-hazard biological containment laboratories in the hands of a private company would shift the emphasis from safety to profits. And it would kill employee morale. Why take the chance? Plum Island remained under federal control. Until Dr. Breeze arrived.
In 1988, a year after Breeze took control, a performance work statement (PWS) was prepared. This was essentially a chart of all the tasks that private contractors (and the government’s own “in house” team) would bid on. From the start, there were signs that the PWS was prepared incorrectly. In an internal memorandum, the government review panel noted “many misleading statements concerning the real situation with underground storage tanks, existing fuel spills, the chemical management program... etc.” The panel said the PWS had been “sugarcoated” and charged it did “not reflect the reality of the true pressing problems” at Plum Island. It seemed like the PWS was being rigged to lure an unsuspecting outside contractor into snatching the bid.
“It was a political decision to do it,” Dr. Breeze says today of the Plum Island privatization. “It had nothing to do with me or anybody else in USDA—that’s just the way it is.” But at the time, responding to the review panel, Dr. Breeze exploded. “There are no misleading statements,” he wrote. Instead, the panel had “misunderstood several issues. . . . There are no obvious deficiencies we know of. . . . If [the review panel] feels this PWS is ‘sugarcoated,’ I am very willing to make their specific concerns known.” Definitive words from someone who supposedly had nothing to do with it.
On Thursday morning, February 21, 1991, four sealed envelopes were opened in Washington. Burns & Roe Services Corporation of New Jersey was awarded the five-year Plum Island contract, with the lowest and best bid: $16.3 million. The government’s in-house team had bid $23.7 million on the same exact PWS. The private contractor had underbid the in-house bid by $7.4 million—more than 30 percent lower. The disparity meant one of two things. Either the private contractor grossly underestimated the costs of the Plum Island project, or the in-house government team engaged in the unfathomable: it tanked its own bid.
Breeze explains his point of view. “There is no secret to this. There’s no way you can shuffle cards around, if you are giving people decent jobs with full medical benefits and all the other benefits that accrue with having a job with the federal government. You cannot compete with people that are being paid minimum wage, with minimal benefits—it’s not possible. It’s actually not something I agree with. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do by any means. But that’s the process.”
Breeze says the two bids during the Callis regime beat the private bids because they combined tasks. Those bids said: “Firefighters would act as janitors, and take away the garbage and clean the toilets and mop the rest rooms . . . the boat crew will maintain motor vehicles, and et cetera. And if that would have been clear up front, that firefighters weren’t going to clean rest rooms, there would have been janitors and the government would have lost.” John Boyle, who admits he was “heavily involved” in the privatization process, said, “You have to be really, really creative to have the government submit the winning bid. We put together a good bid—a competitive contract. To preserve it, [the union] had to give something up, and they didn’t want to give up some jobs. I was quite frankly afraid we were going to win it. I didn’t want to win it.”
Most Americans instantly recall exactly where they were and what they were doing at the moment they heard President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, or that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded. For Plum Islanders, May 3, 1991, was one of those days.
John Boyle recalls the moment he heard Plum Island would be privatized for the first time in its history. “I was sitting in my office, staring out on the lawn, out on Gardiner’s Bay, just daydreaming for a few moments, when Ernie [Escarcega, Breeze’s facilities manager] calls me and says, ‘A-76 is coming in!’ And I thought, ‘Well, thank God.’ I personally considered it a blessing. . . .” Walking out of his office, Boyle saw men wringing their hands and women crying in the hallways. “Crestfallen is way too mild a word. For these people, it was like getting news your son was killed in a car crash. I am not overstating it, either.” Dr. Breeze also remembers the scene. “Chaos—it was the first time any of the employees had an inkling they might really lose their jobs.”
Seizing the moment, the very next morning Burns & Roe executives called an all-hands 8:00 a.m. meeting in the old Army chapel. Exhausted, Stanley Mickaliger had just finished an eight-hour graveyard shift in Lab 257 and trudged over to the chapel. “When I got to the meeting hall, they were already introducing each other, giving all these speeches—all these men with suntan lotion on all over, you know? It clearly wasn’t the government anymore. They were these big contractor types.” As the crowd slowly filed in, they were handed sealed envelopes holding the documents that determined the fate of their careers. Mickaliger walked over to an official looking woman for guidance. She told him they were not taking questions, not now—“You have to catch the ten a.m. boat because we’re not going to be paying overtime anymore. You can look at your letter on the boat.”
Shunted onto the ferry, Mickaliger and the others tore open their letters. “It had all this information, on a bunch of papers, but I didn’t understand a lot of it.” One thing was clear, though—he’d been fired. And the severance package was nil. The fifteen-year-veteran’s remaining choices were a bit limited. “I could have went to Calverton [National Cemetery, a nearby federal facility with openings], but that wasn’t my cup of tea. See, I had been a master plumber for forty years. Now I’m going to dig graves and bury people? My wife and I lost our health insurance at age sixty—I had to pay 102 percent of the cost. The letter said if I retired, I got only 40 percent of the eligible Social Security benefit I paid into all those years. I remember complaining to them, saying, ‘Hey, I know guys here have thirty years in. But I’ve put in a good fifteen years—do you think you can help me?’ They gave me COBRA for six months.”8
8 When the contractor came in, a Burns & Roe corporate vice president had big news for his new charges. “All employees will receive, in addition to their base salaries, $2.07 per hour. And they can do whatever they want with it.” Of course, nearly all were forced to apply the extra dollars to the health insurance premiums that tripled, just as their annual salaries plummeted.
The days of “respecting personal dignity... recognizing work achievement . . . providing work security” were over. So was the old feeling that working on Plum Island was like being part of an extended family, that it was a career. For the roughly one hundred support workers left behind (which would decrease to seventy-five by 1995), employment at the Plum Island exotic germ laboratory would now simply be a job. And thereafter it would have all the dedication to mission, attention to detail, pride in workmanship, and camaraderie that accompanied a job.
A newspaper editorial published at the time captured the moment: “How would you feel if you worked for somebody for 15 years and a new boss came in and told you that you were losing your seniority and most of your benefits? What’s more, you will be paid half of what you were paid to do the same job and your annual vacation days will be reduced from 25 to zero in the first year.” And that was only if the contractor kept your position—“Remember,” says one employee, “those that were allowed to stay were offered ‘a’ job, not ‘your’ job.” And those were the lucky ones. A deeper sympathy was reserved for the seventy-five or so that were fired or pushed off the island into the bitter seas of early retirement. The negative effects on the community of the privatization layoffs at Plum Island, the east end’s largest employer, were real.9
9 In time, east end engineers and skilled tradesmen found diminished opportunities, serving thousands of wealthy summer colonists on the North Fork and in the Hamptons in the fine arts of pool cleaning, tennis court maintenance, landscaping, and golf course maintenance. A few dug graves at Calverton National Cemetery.
Even the USDA grudgingly admitted it had been a “challenging transition period.” A former Plum Island official described the transition with a bit more flavor. He calls it “the biggest clusterfuck you ever saw in your life.”
Like he did with the ferry debacle, Congressman Hochbrueckner complained again, saying privatization “was handled poorly. The workers were treated shabbily.” For a politician who publicly bemoaned the woes of Plum Island numerous times, he accomplished surprisingly little. Says Dr. Breeze of Hochbrueckner rants, “He said, ‘I’m going to block it,’ and that was just disingenuous at best. He knew quite well the way privatization worked. He knew exactly what was going to happen.”
The congressman wasn’t the only one feigning powerlessness. “I wanted the government to hold a series of meetings where you explained to the workers the process under way,” explains Dr. Breeze. “Absolutely nobody would do that and it wasn’t up to me to do it. I actually couldn’t get it done.” Those meetings never happened. Breeze says he had nothing to do with the privatization or the transition, though the record clearly indicates the opposite. He could have, like Dr. Callis before him, warded off the A-76 guillotine by invoking the “overriding factors” exception, based on the island’s unique risks and unfathomable dangers among federal facilities. After all, Plum Island was no run-of-the-mill federal office building, where you’d apply for a passport or pick up a Social Security check. “When Dr. Callis was there, we had the rigid safety standards that almost made it impossible for the contractor to bid,” says a longtime Plum Island scientist. “And they could have applied for an exemption this time around, but they didn’t.”
Retired Plum Island scientists Drs. Jim and Carol House believe without question that Breeze had the power to halt the privatization steamroller. “He could have stopped it, prevented it,” says Jim. “Oh yeah, absolutely.” Carol adds, “The next time [privatization] came up, [Breeze] threw in all of the inside support services, so it became a big enough ‘plum’ to bid on—he reengineered the [PWS] so that more was included. He personally did that.” “We said from day zero that this is a place that should not be contracted out,” continues Jim House. “It can’t be—there are just too many concerns.” Despite their beliefs now, Plum Island scientists remained silent, instead of speaking out to fight the process. As a result, many of the support workers, says union leader Ed Hollreiser, felt betrayed.
As one employee said, “All it took was the swipe of a pen” to prevent Plum Island from being contracted out. But Dr. Breeze kept his pen in his pocket protector.
When asked why he wanted to see the government lose the bid, John Boyle replies, “Because I felt at that time—the neophyte that I was—that getting into the private sector would save money and that [the contractor] would get rid of the riffraff, and it would run more efficiently for less money.” The USDA, indeed, trumpeted the Plum Island privatization. They said contracting out to Burns & Roe would save taxpayers $1 million a year, and that support costs would decline by $5 million, or 20 percent, over the length of the contract.
Not everyone thought it would be a financial windfall, however. One prescient senior employee told a newspaper, “There will be cost overruns, and eventually it will cost more than it did with the people they laid off.” Later, it would be learned that the PWS grossly underestimated the required material and manpower to run Plum Island.10
10 For example, the PWS estimated 43 vehicles, 15 daily ferry trips, 50 biological air filters, and 75 meals. In actuality there were 51 vehicles to operate, 24 ferry trips to make, 98 air filters to regularly maintain and replace, and 135 meals to prepare.
In most organizations, taking out the trash, tending the grounds, mowing the lawns, and providing clerical support seem like responsibilities that should be handled by a contractor. But Plum Island is not your typical institution. Positions like firefighters, security guards, ferry operators, engineers, incinerator operators, ventilation system operators, electric operators, nitrogen freezer caretakers, power monitors, and sewer decontamination plant operators hold seriously heightened responsibilities. At the home of the most dangerous germs known to man, even the grounds crew and typists must be specially trained and abide by complicated guidelines. Ed Hollreiser comments, “My take is that management was so poor, contracting out would be an easier way to go. This way, they could yell at someone now besides themselves. They could hold a contractor accountable and blame them for all the mishaps.”
A USDA laboratory in Ames, Iowa, was also put out for privatization at this time. Though the Ames lab houses far less dangerous germs, the staff there, surprisingly, remained under federal government control. And it remains in federal hands today. In August 2003, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin fought off a renewed push to privatize Ames by introducing legislation barring non-governmental workers at the laboratory. He called Ames’s research “a vital function of the federal government, and it should remain the responsibility of federal employees.” There seems to be no other reason for this glaring inconsistency between the two laboratories than the personal wishes of a director looking to slash non-research costs and yoke his workforce. Breeze muses, “It’s sort of surprising that Ames hasn’t gone out to a contractor. I think it will eventually go to a contractor—it’s just a push that various administrations do to different degrees.”
Privatization resulted in federally trained, highly skilled workers with decades of experience being bartered away in exchange for a cost-cutting, efficiency-driven private contractor. But on paper, it looked good, and the credit redounded to Plum Island’s director, Dr. Breeze. Most important for Breeze, it freed up more funds for science, his primary goal. At least that’s how it was supposed to go.
Back in 1965, Jerry Callis described his island laboratory at an international conference by saying, “Safety is uppermost in our minds in everything we do.” If that meant less money for science, then so be it. Some three decades later, costs, not safety, were uppermost in management’s minds. With the support staff slashed by 40 percent, and the Breeze team cutting every support line item, some other details—like biological safety and security—were compromised. For starters, the two-day Plum Island orientation course, after which new employees were ordered to study a three-inch-thick safety manual as if it were the Bible, was now boiled down to a forty-minute VHS tape and a two-page flyer. The “Nothing Leaves” policy was abandoned. Vehicles and items trafficked among the two laboratory buildings, Long Island, and Connecticut without being decontaminated at all. Contractors, who once had to be escorted (“The escort had to take a shower with these men, take their cigarette breaks with them, even go into the bathroom with them,” remembers one), now roamed free.11 The color-coded badge system was discontinued, and the identification numbers disappeared. Against the advice of an outside consulting firm, the fiveman full-time professional fire department was converted to one firefighter and a bucket brigade of volunteers.12
11 For the record, I was escorted during the last of my six visits to Plum Island.
12 An outside consulting firm hired to evaluate the Plum Island Fire Department recommended three options to Dr. Breeze: buy new equipment and retain the full-time professional department; retain the outmoded equipment and the department; or buy new equipment and institute a volunteer brigade of workers performing other functions. The firm stated that the volunteer brigade, while the cheapest, was “the worst of the three options.” Dr. Breeze chose that option. After one fire alarm went off under his reorganized fire department, Dr. Breeze was thoroughly disgusted—with his own choice—as reflected in an internal memo blasting a supervisor: “An ill-assorted group of people drift up wearing various items of clothing, but usually not the firefighter turnout gear we went [through the trouble] to provide, and mill about without apparent discipline or leadership.”
For years, security on intruders was “like white on rice,” as one veteran employee describes it. The once thirty-four-man-strong armed guard platoon—checking off ID numbers at the ferry dock, manning the lab compound gatehouses—was dispensed with. One “safety technician” now stood in place of all the guards. He wore an empty gun holster to scare away intruders. One of the fired security guards, Phillip Zerillo, told a reporter there was “a total disregard for security. . . . The place is just going crazy. It’s running by luck now.” Today it’s no different. “You could walk onto that island right now,” says an employee. “Two Eskimos in a kayak could invade and take Plum Island.”13 There are two private security firm guards, one at Orient Point and one protecting all of Plum Island. The U.S. Coast Guard patrolled the island’s surrounding waters until 1977, when it decommissioned the Plum Island Lighthouse. After a brief Plum Island detail following September 11, 2001, Coast Guard cutters again retreated, leaving Plum Island without any marine patrol.
13 Indeed, on August 1, 1997, vandals from Connecticut came over to Plum Island by boat and vandalized the Plum Island Lighthouse. By chance, the Plum Island marine crew at Orient Point noticed them and shooed them away. On several occasions I was offered the opportunity to be smuggled onto Plum Island: “We could get on my boat, put you in a lab coat, put you ashore, and you can walk right into the laboratory. You can go in and walk out with whatever you want.” Though the offers seemed both convincing and tantalizing, I declined.
An internal memorandum dispensing with and erasing away decades of safety closed on an bizarre note: “We welcome any and all suggestions, recommendations, criticisms, and attaboys . . . as well as fishing tips, a good joke, and restaurant recommendations.”
In perhaps the most egregious of the safety lapses, the sentinel animals, Plum Island’s “canaries in the mine,” were eliminated. These test animals were kept outdoors and tested periodically to ensure no germs had escaped the lab. Said a USDA safety director of the move, “From a biological safety perspective, the best thing that ever happened to Plum was the discontinuation of Animal Supply,” because he believed it eliminated the threat of disease transmission. But it also eliminated the island’s last line of defense. After all, they had successfully alerted the Plum Island scientists to the virus outbreak. Having the control animals outside “keeps you honest,” says Plum Island scientist Dr. Doug Gregg. It was akin to a mother removing the smoke detector from her baby’s bedroom. The laboratories, now more than ever, became ticking time bombs and the public, unknowing sitting ducks.
But one thing remained clear: the new way was certainly cheaper. And the cost-conscious attack on safety soon became literal—the Plum Island biological safety office itself suffered. First it was divided into contractor safety and government safety. Then contractor safety was eliminated, and the government safety department was slashed down to three staffers. The money saved went toward recruits’ salaries and their new scientific equipment, and amenities like touring bicycles and a high-tech exercise gym.
Veteran scientists became concerned over the hacking away of four decades of carefully thought-out biological safety procedures. Former Plum Islander Dr. Ronald Yedoutschnig told a reporter, “When I was there, every person on the island was the same. But today, there are fewer permanent employees. I would be more safety conscious because the [new] people are less safety conscious. The agents we are working with are highly infectious.” Says Dr. Richard Endris: “When I was there, the safety was good. Now when it went from a system that is based on employee loyalty and integrity to one of the lowest bidder, I was very concerned that safety would be compromised. Little things, like the backup power generator going out during a storm. The redundant systems are the absolute key. You have to maintain air pressure, the airflow, the freezers. . . .”
Dr. Gregg ponders what privatization has wrought upon the island’s morale. “Morale is not as good,” he says. High turnover in the workforce contributes further to the problem. “The contracting out was a major blow to the unity of the island,” says Dr. Jim House, “and it’s still a problem today. A lot of the esprit de corps with the people is gone—they’re not there for more than a year and there’s a turnover. The turnover after two, three years had 90 percent of the people gone—people that had been there for years.” Unfortunately, low morale often translates into poor performance on the job.
The USDA should best be able to assess Plum Island’s safety. Out of a possible 100 points under rating system, the USDA scored Burns & Roe, the contractor they chose to run Plum Island, 54.3, 43.9, and 60. The score of 60 was the minimum acceptable performance number.
Sometimes poetry captures the human condition better than prose. Plum Island Lighthouse keeper Captain William Wetmore penned “Plum Island” in the mid-1800s:
There is a rock-bound Island off Long Island’s shore;
Where you hear the music of the Ocean’s roar.
There you see a light-house on a rocky bluff—
Tides there a roaring, surging; waters sometimes rough.
One hundred and fifty years later, this line and verse was pulled from a file in Lab 101:
What in the world’s going on over there;
We heard that there is a “new Breeze in the air.”
Who denounced the achievements of thirty-some years;
And announced that a time of success would appear.
Just what has he done in three years on the job;
See those new scientists that fancy boat bobs.
Back and forth, forth and back to Connecticut and
Of course the new carpet has served to expand
USDA’s credit both here and abroad;
That use of our taxes we can all applaud.
It seems that there’s only one thing to say:
That new Breeze just may blow Plum Island away.
One employee summed it up more succinctly: “Breeze? “Breeze was a fucking doomsday machine.”
11
Boomerang
You have to understand. If somebody took all this away from
you . . . you wouldn’t take a little revenge?
—PLUM ISLAND EMPLOYEE
The sprightly librarian Frances Demorest was now the longest serving employee on Plum Island, and her seniority carried a lot of
weight among the Plum Island family. When the sky started falling,
many of them ran to her, shared their problems, even cried away their
woes on her shoulder. Well spoken and outspoken, Fran resolved to do something, and in 1990 she wrote Congressman Hochbrueckner a six-page single-spaced letter carefully detailing everything she heard. “If I should be harassed and then forced to take my retirement,” Fran wrote, “I shall do so. But I feel that someone has to attempt to stop what is being done to and at Plum Island. I started employment on March 15th, 1954, and am still very active, in good health, maintain an impeccable leave record, and desire to continue working at PIADC.” She proceeded to describe the firing of the four scientists, the ferryboat escapade, the inequitable perks afforded to new scientists, and now the privatization debacle. “This is a lengthy letter,” she closed, “and I hope it has provided fuel, facts, and additional information... looking forward to you taking the ‘bull by the horns.’ ” Following Fran Demorest from that point, one had to wonder if Dr. Roger Breeze had somehow come upon a copy of her courageous letter.
Breeze was enamored with The Silence of the Lambs, the thriller that mentions Plum Island as a summer getaway for the evil Dr. Hannibal Lecter. He actually decorated his office with a life-sized cutout of the cannibalistic Dr. Lecter. Breeze’s next move seemed like a page right out of Thomas Harris’s novel. Soon after she wrote the letter, he ordered Fran to take a new assignment: the sixty-seven-year-old grandmother was relegated to the murky basement of Building 14 for a special project in Central Files—the obliteration of Central Files. In a cruel twist, the longtime assistant librarian was forced to discard Plum Island’s entire library of records. “I was ordered to destroy everything—everything! I was to clean out all of it, because he said there was no more need for it.” Exiled to the musty catacombs of the hundred-year-old Army hospital, Fran destroyed forty years of historical records—they were shredded, bagged, and lined up in the dank hallway awaiting the incinerator. What about the preservation of Plum Island’s past? “Breeze didn’t give a damn about the island’s history,” says Dr. Gregg. “He wanted everything thrown out.”
“When he took me off my job and put me down in that basement,” says Fran, “it just felt humiliating.” Barely finished with bagging the shredded records, she was transferred again, to the telephone switchboard in the guardhouse. While trying her best to handle her new responsibility over the next two months, Fran became gradually lethargic and had to be hospitalized. Her doctor diagnosed her with bilateral severe maxillary sinusitis.
She was unsure of the cause of that condition—the otherwise healthy Fran had never before felt tightness in her chest and sinus pain—until a scientist checking in with her after her hospital stay put his finger on it. Unknowingly, Fran had been inhaling insidious formaldehyde vapors seeping into the switchboard room. When notified of this, Plum Island’s brass had the solution. She was transferred to the rusted, corrugated steel warehouse at the harbor, to chug around on a grimy forklift and record inventory. Physically weakened and mentally drained from the abuse, Fran Demorest quit her job (“I took my retirement,” she prefers to say with pride). She wasn’t surprised by the antics—she had predicted them when she wrote her letter.
“Fran needed to be fired because you couldn’t change her,” remembers John Boyle. “Fired or transferred into some other job where she wasn’t involved in everybody’s business—I think we eliminated her job. I’m not certain.”
And, thought Breeze and his minions, that was one less voice they had to contend with from the Plum Island peanut gallery.
THE BROKEN PACT
For decades, little was known about Plum Island, owing in large part to the blind loyalty of those who worked there. The initial tumult over the USDA’s “choice” of Plum Island had long ago faded from memory. The three hundred strong, locally hired workforce put bread on many a table on the bucolic North Fork, increasingly hampered by an evaporating rural economy in need of jobs with good pay, security, and retirement benefits. A close-knit Plum Island family grew, strengthened by the ferry ride each morning, like children riding to school together on a big yellow bus. Employees’ children—children of scientists, secretaries, and steamfitters— went to east end schools together and played sports together. Workers—of both white- and blue-collar extraction—went fishing together, and barbequed together on the weekends. If you didn’t work on Plum Island, chances were two or three of your friends or neighbors did. An unspoken pact evolved, an implicit bond between the Plum Island workforce and the brass: attacking Plum Island wouldn’t be attacking your place of work—it would bring shame upon your family. Better to be tight-lipped about our Plum Island, went the thinking, because the press and general public doesn’t understand us and always discredits us, and makes us look bad— and that’s not good for business. That’s not good for our family. “It was a great-paying job with great benefits,” said one worker, “when others around here were digging clams and planting potatoes—so we kept it quiet. And management basically said to us: ‘We’ll keep this place safe, you keep your mouth shut, and we’ll take care of you.’ ”
But many now felt that Dr. Roger Breeze had shredded, like with Central Files, that pact of loyalty, stuffed it in a big black bag, and sent it to the incinerator. And unlike a typical corporate downsizing, here the employees knew the downsizing and vile treatment were preventable, had the director really cared about them or the nature of the work being performed.
Dr. Breeze would pay the price for his disloyalty. The floodgates opened and revelations poured forth. Federal agencies started receiving an unprecedented number of anonymous phone calls about the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. So did the major newspapers, and the television stations. The Federal Office of Special Counsel, which runs the toll-free whistleblower program, received more anonymous tips about Plum Island than about any other federal facility in the nation.
Workers called the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington, D.C., and told them about large sewage spills and massive landfills and Army bunkers filled with drums of hazardous chemicals. They reported leaking underground oil tanks, a sewage plant that didn’t work properly, and a faulty wastewater treatment plant that dumped untested sewage into Long Island Sound. They told them fellow workers were ordered to toss unmarked plastic bottles and Clorox bottles filled with unknown liquid chemicals into the incinerators. Workers were told to run the incinerators only when the winds blew due east, out toward the Atlantic Ocean, to avoid mainland detection of noxious emission clouds.
An incredulous EPA came out to Plum Island to investigate the claims. They couldn’t believe their eyes. They came upon dump sites and bunkers stuffed with scores of rusting (and ruptured) metal drums containing solvents, oils, ethylene oxide, creosote, hydrochloric acid, and paraformaldehyde, and still more drums that contained unknowns. They toured the wastewater treatment plant and found it out of service, along with effluent that wasn’t chlorinated to kill germs and a storm pipe that ran straight into the sound without going through treatment. The EPA then witnessed thick black smoke billowing out of the Lab 101 incinerator, and asked for samples of the ash to test for toxic content.
The EPA cited Plum Island for multiple violations of the Clean Water Act and environmental laws prohibiting the storage of hazardous materials. Threatened with legal action, the USDA agreed to stop polluting, and to spend $150,000 on remediation efforts.
The USDA knew for years about these environmental conditions and that they might come to light one day. A letter by the assistant secretary of agriculture, dated years before the EPA investigation, noted Plum Island’s “improper handling of asbestos-containing material [forty thousand pounds worth], sanitary landfills in violation of state standards, and improper management of hazardous wastes.” But they never told the EPA. Dissatisfied with Plum Island’s snail-paced remediation progress, the EPA brought legal action against the USDA, seeking $111,000 in civil penalties for the environmental and hazardous waste law violations. Years after the action was brought, much of the waste still remained. Again, the EPA charged the USDA with violating federal environmental laws. In 1999, the USDA agreed to pay $32,500 in fines (a fraction of the earlier fine) and promised, once again, not to violate laws protecting the environment.
Whistleblowers also called the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), telling them about employees becoming strangely ill from exposure to unknown animal viruses and bacteria. OSHA learned about the lack of a biological workplace safety program, and of inconsistent vaccine programs. The agency also learned about radioactive isotopes being handled without monitors and protective equipment, locked emergency exit doors, and about the professional fire department being replaced with an unqualified volunteer bucket brigade.
OSHA was far less skeptical about problems at Plum Island than the EPA. Plum Island had made OSHA’s “High Hazard List” of unsafe workplaces back in 1988, when workers’ compensation claims on the island were found to be triple the national average. Investigating the island, OSHA inspectors quickly discovered exposed electrical cables, shoddy electric outlets, open incinerator pits, untested fire alarms, expired fire extinguishers, locked emergency exit doors, unmarked hot water pipes, and workers bitten and trampled by animals. OSHA cited the USDA for no less than 139 workplace safety violations. When asked by a local newspaper about the violations, Dr. Breeze explained that $50,000 would be redirected from important road-sealing and building painting projects to correct the OSHA safety violations. The money would not be coming out of scientific funds, he said, including those earmarked for new equipment, the fleet of bikes, or the scientists’ exercise gym.
On national average, OSHA on-site inspections occur about once every eighty years. But OSHA returned to Plum Island five years later. This time around, OSHA not only found many of the previous violations uncorrected, they also encountered numerous new violations: no emergency procedures or safety training for handling ethanol, formaldehyde, or radioactive compounds like Cobalt-60; disposal of used virus syringes in penetrable containers; no vaccinations for employees; improper storage of compressed gas cylinders; unlabeled and mislabeled hazardous chemical containers; no protection against carcinogen exposure; and no safety training for handling blood-borne virus and bacterial pathogens. OSHA apportioned the blame for the 124 new violations between the USDA and private contractor Burns & Roe. Of those, Plum Island was cited with 67 “Serious” violations, those which can lead directly to death or serious injury. Burns & Roe was ordered to pay $54,375 in punitive fines; those costs were ultimately borne by their client, the U.S. government. As a repeat offender, the USDA should have warranted—at the very least—a heavy fine. Yet because it was a sister government agency, OSHA could not legally fine or shut down Plum Island, like it would any private business. Instead, the USDA’s entire penalty for 67 potentially fatal safety violations—an immense 263 violations overall—was a letter listing the violations sent to the secretary of agriculture’s office.
When asked about the OSHA violations, Dr. Breeze scoffs. “The OSHA thing is a rat to me, I think. What does it really mean? The exit sign needs to be above the door, there isn’t a sign warning this or that. When people think of OSHA, they think of small children next to rotating circular saw blades or furnaces, but it’s usually not like that. It’s like a vehicle inspection—people find bits and pieces and they need to get things changed, but they’re not structurally very important.” [what an ass this guy was DC]
Though the USDA’s fellow government agencies investigated Plum Island and meted out punishments, nearly all of it was deflected. After all, Plum Island was not a private company that could be closed—neither the EPA nor OSHA had the authority to shut down the USDA. So a harsh reality ruled on Plum Island. The federal government was brazenly ignoring its own laws.
If the first round of whistleblowing was limited in its effectiveness, the second round held great potential. Current and former employees called every media outlet they could think of. They told reporters about herds of deer roaming the island, and a doe and her two fawns being gunned down by soldiers in Army Blackhawk helicopters, and about an employee who caught Nairobi sheep disease.
A media siege erupted. CNN and ABC, Newsday and the New York Times, national and local reporters all bombarded Plum Island for information on the allegations. Their faces blurred and voices distorted, workers sat before television cameras and told what they knew.
CNN ran a report with footage of Pete Swenson, a former Plum Island safety technician who left the area in disgust and moved to Virginia. Seated next to his wife at his kitchen table, the stocky, middle-aged Swenson told a harrowing tale. Outdoors he had been bitten on the leg by a horsefly and scratched the bite, thinking nothing of it. He entered Lab 257 to decontaminate a room that held animals infected with Nairobi sheep disease. Days later, his leg swelled and ulcerated, and he developed severe flu like symptoms. His illness got so bad he checked into the Long Island Veterans’ Hospital. Swenson told the attending doctor where he worked and that he suspected he had contracted Nairobi sheep disease, at which point a foreign disease specialist was brought in. According to Swenson, the specialist told him, “That disease is not here in the U.S.—I’m not sure how you could have it.” Swenson recovered, but not without a memento for his troubles: CNN cameras focused on an oval-shaped scar about two inches wide, burnished deep into in the middle of his left calf. When reporters asked Dr. Jerry Crawford (a new Plum Island official handling the media) if Swenson had been infected, he replied, “Probably, no.” Possibly, they asked? “Possibly—yes. Some of the diseases— humans can catch a form of it, and get flu like symptoms.”
Two stories involved more disturbing occurrences. In the winter of 1992, three cardboard boxes filled with biological samples blew off the back of the ferry into heavy seas. An emergency call went over the radio that morning, and a special boat crew was called to duty. A captain and two able-bodied seamen plowed back and forth through Plum Gut, and then around Plum Island’s perimeter, looking for the missing cargo. An island official called off the search after only a few runs. The three boxes were never recovered. Three employees confirm the accident. “What if it didn’t sink?” says one of them, shaking his head. “What if some kid hooked it on his fishing pole? What if it floated to a beach in Southampton, or Sag Harbor, or Montauk?” The germs were taken away by the currents, bobbing up and down inside a Styrofoam cushion inside a cardboard box. But management didn’t seem too concerned. “ ‘Nah, don’t worry about it,’ they said to us—‘Don’t worry about it.’ ”
The second most damning incident had scores of dead birds lying outside Laboratory 101. This allegation had a document written by Dr. Breeze that went along with it: Concerns have been raised about dead seagulls in the Lab 101 light court. The most recently dead bird was frozen by Burns & Roe and has been passed to Lab 257 for pathological examination....I would ask that Lab 257 confirm that infectious agents used in Labs 101 and 257 are not avian bird pathogens...and report on postmortem findings in this bird.
“Seagulls used to land on the 101 roof all the time, with no problem,” says one employee. “We have contractors building all over the place, including on top of the roof. Then, all of a sudden, these birds are dying, and they didn’t attribute it to anything.” Fearing a problem, a contractor presented one of the birds to Dr. Breeze with a memorandum for the record. “It’s the fox watching the chicken coop,” the employee says of Plum Island’s self analysis of a biological containment leak. “Take the seagulls and bring them to someone who doesn’t have an agenda.” Asked about the event, a USDA official said, “The veterinary pathologists on Plum Island are about the best around. They’ll find out what killed the birds.” Under the Freedom of Information Act, a request was made for the results of the “postmortem findings” on the nine birds reputedly autopsied (sources indicate there were many more dead birds). As of this writing, the USDA has refused to respond.
When the gaggle of news reporters first learned of Plum Island’s many woes from the disgruntled mob, they turned to the island’s director for answers. Dr. Roger Breeze told the New York Times they had the wrong guy. “I’m not responsible for the operation of the support services and facilities at Plum Island,” he told them. As one knowledgeable source says, “Breeze had thought, ‘Whoa, wait a second here—I did all this work for USDA, got this lab built in four years when they couldn’t over the last twenty-five, and now I’m taking the heat?’ And that is when they brought in Crawford. He was the fall guy to take the flak.”
Enter Dr. Claude G. “Jerry” Crawford. Breeze’s moves to divide and conquer Plum Island had met with plenty of controversy and criticism; he had somehow earned a reprieve from this next fiasco, the Plum Island Workers’ Rebellion. Washington granted him cover in the form of the forty-nine-year-old Jerry Crawford, a USDA career man previously working in Peoria, Illinois, whose specialty was crop seeds. Many suspected an ulterior motive for giving Crawford the newly created position of deputy area director, or “DAD,” as he was known in correspondence (and referred to derisively by the workforce). The plan was to have Breeze do research full time, while letting DAD “run the buildings”—another way of saying “take the flak.”
Ed Hollreiser remembers Crawford’s first day on Plum Island. “When he came in, he gave this big speech to all of us, where he explained his whole background, and how it was on plant research, and how it had nothing to do with animal research. Then he discussed the vacations he took to Europe with his wife. Meanwhile, half of us are about to lose our jobs.” Crawford was a master of malapropism. When asked about cost overruns, he said, “There are no golden toilet seats on Plum Island.” Asked about all the safety problems under Dr. Breeze, he said, “We don’t search handbags or strip search. I believe we can show [security] is warranted for the type of research we do here. We’re not making nuclear bombs.” And when asked about the OSHA violations, he noted it took six months for the safety agency to issue the violations and said, “If these violations had been life-threatening or extremely hazardous to employee safety, one would think OSHA would have done something immediately.” Then realizing what he had said, Crawford added, “Uh, I don’t mean to say these violations are not important. . . .” Finally, when asked about the consequences of an employee’s refusing experimental, non-FDA–approved vaccines, “We will try to find another position. If we don’t have one, they will be terminated. Simple as that.”
When it came to public relations—ostensibly the reason he was on Plum Island—a running joke was that Crawford himself had been infected by the virus that caused foot-in-mouth disease. One top Breeze administration official said, “We all independently formed our own opinion of Crawford’s capabilities in a relatively short period of time, and realized the man was a complete fool.”
Dr. Breeze, spared this particular media feeding frenzy, says the media issues were handled terribly. “It was very reactive.” Another adjective he uses is “comical.” In fact, John Boyle recalls Breeze “sitting in the bleachers, laughing his ass off on that one.”1 Within the next year, the USDA transferred Dr. Crawford to a position near Washington. On his way out, he told a local reporter, “My goal, by opening the island up to the press, was to show the people that we were good neighbors.”
1 Realizing the dearth of Crawford’s PR savvy, USDA headquarters begged Breeze to speak to a New York Times reporter to cool things down, and the two hit it off. That reporter ultimately became Dr. Breeze’s second wife.
RAW SEWAGE, RECYCLED
“If you flush it or drink it, it comes to me.”
“Joe Zeliff” worked in Building 102, the wastewater decontamination chamber for Lab 101, known to those on the inside as “The Big Shithouse” (Lab 257’s chamber was the “Little” one). One of Joe’s responsibilities included pulling liquid samples from the sewage tanks after they went through the decon process—that is, after the goo had snaked through a series of tubes that heated it up to 214 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour. The samples were handed over to the safety officers, who would inject them into test animals to ensure that systems in Building 102 were operating correctly. It was crude safety, but it worked.
For years, Joe would prepare a safety sample each Thursday morning. He doesn’t pull samples now. “We haven’t done that, well, since Breeze came in,” Joe says. Now, Joe has no idea whether the liquid waste coming out of Building 102 is alive or dead.
“They’ve recently added new gauges, but I don’t think even those gauges read right.” Sometimes the low temperature alarm rings at 203 degrees Fahrenheit on the new system; other times it goes off at 198 degrees, and still other times it buzzes at 206 degrees, the temperature which is supposed to set it off. Sometimes he doesn’t get a low temperature alarm, like the one time he realized too late that the heat exchangers had failed and the sewage went through cold. The old system had ten tiny heat probes inside the booster, heat exchange, and retention tubes that relayed the temperatures within up to the control panel. The new system only has two temperature readings: going in and coming out.
When Joe and other operators in Building 102 hear the low temperature alarm, they are first supposed to shut the system down. Then they gradually bring it back up to 214 degrees, and only then do they restart the pumps. But it doesn’t work that way. Why not? “Because frankly, it’s a pain in the ass—you’d be shutting the entire system down every single day, every fifteen minutes. It’s not that the operators don’t want to do it. It’s just that the gauges malfunction constantly.” The tanks, including the 27,000- gallon main tank (“You could honestly get lost inside it,” says Joe. “It’s the size of my house”) have large cold spots, like when one swims in a warm lake and hits a chilly pocket of water. In these cold slugs, billions of viruses and bacteria stay alive through the contaminated sewage treatment.
A February 1993 incident form noted a “critical alarm sewage spill” in Building 102. Joe remembers, “I was directly involved with this.” Since the building opened in 1956, the plant had always run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But the private contractor ran it only ten hours a day. “The collection process will be unattended, with 100 percent reliance upon the automatic and emergency collection equipments,” stated an internal USDA letter on this decision. “They did it to save money,” says Joe, shaking his head in disgust. “What else?”
One winter night, an operator left his shift after recording the 27,000 gallon No. 2 tank as only 7,000 gallons full. High winds and rough sea conditions prevented the next shift from getting to the island the following day, so it remained unattended. When the weather finally calmed, the shift operator opened the door to Building 102 and came upon a putrid smell—something had gone terribly wrong in the tank area. A single 1,000-pound cow excretes from 75 to 115 pounds of manure a day, and a single 200-pound pig, 35 to 65 pounds; it isn’t hard to see how quickly raw, infected sewage accumulates on Plum Island each day. Second only to the incinerator charging room, Building 102 is the biologically “hottest” area, and is therefore kept painstakingly clean. On a normal day, “that building is as clean as a whistle,” says Joe. “It is cleaner than my house—you could eat off the floor in there.” But that morning, the operator and his assistant, who came upon the large pool of gushing brown mess, were gagging within seconds for clean air. “I saw nothing but shit all over the place,” says the operator. “Raw, no decontamination, viruses and who knows what—everywhere.” The men witnessed a macabre sight: a continuous flow of contaminated sewage, vomiting out of the overflow valve, after being pumped from the No. 2 tank, through a daisy chain of pipes. Underneath the pool of sewage, fluid was emptying into the floor drains, where sump pumps sent it back into the No. 2 tank; from there, it cycled through again. “We were essentially recycling raw sewage,” says Joe. First, the men processed some contaminated sewage out to make room in the tanks. Then, donning Tyvek protective jumpsuits, hip boots, and face respirators, they drained and mopped up the mess, flushing the room down with Roccal solution. Research in Lab 101 seized up for two days. “They couldn’t so much as flush a toilet in 101, because we couldn’t handle it in 102.”
The spill form cautions its reader “NOTE: This bldg. was UNMANNED for 32 hrs.” Under the old way of doing things, it would have been manned—the overnight shift would have worked overtime on the island through the next day and ridden out the storm. Of course, it would have cost more money than running Building 102 at one 10-hour shift per day. Joe observes, “See, the contractor said, ‘We need more money to pay for more men.’ The government said, ‘We’re not paying you any more money,’ and the contractor said, ‘If you’re not paying us, we’re not putting operators in there twenty-four hours and you’re going to have another spill.’ ” At this time, the contractor’s vice president of operations told a reporter that safety on Plum Island was “really governed by the client,” and his client—the USDA—was under “very serious budget constraints.” Another executive privately admitted exactly where his company stood, saying, “We can’t staff the facility to the level we’d like to.”
This round-robin routine is a prime example of why certain government functions at Plum Island should be kept in federal hands, and ought not be privatized.
TURTLES AND GEESE
After exiting Building 102, effluent travels to the nearby wastewater treatment plant, which uses a process called activated sludge. It enters a pond at about 150 degrees (assuming Building 102 is functioning properly), and aerators froth the fluid up like a bubbly hot tub. The hard stuff drops to the bottom and a set of six-foot-long weirs skim the “cream” off the top and push it into a clarifier, where more settling takes place. The bacteria are routed back into the aeration tank, and the remaining cream goes under a set of ultraviolet photochemical radiation lamps before being pumped into Plum Island Harbor, which empties into Plum Gut, whose waters disperse north into the Long Island Sound, and south to the Hamptons. The cream used to be chlorinated, but was replaced with UV lights to cut costs.2
2 The jury is still out on which method of final treatment, chlorine or UV radiation, is preferable. While chlorine is considered highly toxic to marine life, UV radiation may not be inactivating all of the billions of viruses and bacteria contained in sewage. UV is far cheaper than using chlorine, which must be replenished regularly.
The most troubling part of this whole process is found at the end of the pipe. Despite the particularly hazardous content of the Plum Island wastewater treatment plant’s outfall, it is tested monthly, no different than any other municipal sewage plant. Following New York State and EPA laws, Plum Island tests for suspended solids and coliforms. Coliforms are harmless bacteria, not normally in water, but found in warm-blooded mammals. The presence of fecal coliform bacteria in the water is a bellwether for other microbes; that is, it indicates that the water contains many other bacteria and viruses not being tested, including harmful disease-causing germs. When traced back to a municipal sewage plant, this means the water is transmitting typhoid fever, diphtheria, hepatitis, dysentery, gastroenteritis, or other domestic virus and bacteria infections. High levels of fecal coliform out of the exotic animal germ labs on Plum Island present a unique and highly dangerous situation.
For water to be acceptable for swimming, it should have fewer than 200 colonies of coliforms per 100 milliliters of water sampled; fewer than 1,000 colonies are acceptable for fishing and boating.3 Plum Island’s legally permissible limit is 700 colonies per day. Required by law to be tested once a month, Plum Island’s coliform levels were above that limit for seven months during a twelve-month span between 1996 and 1997. In October 1996 and March 1997, the levels tested at 900 colonies, well over acceptable standards for swimming in the waters of the Hamptons, America’s elite summer playground. But that was the best of it. Other monthly counts ranged from 1,000 to 6,000. And during one fateful month, February 1997, Plum Island spewed out an enormous 23,000 colonies per 100 milliliters sampled—115 times higher than the acceptable limit for swimming, 33 times higher than the island’s legally permissible limit, and 23 times higher than the fishing and boating limit. Additional documents show this was not a fluke. Back in 1990 and 1991, Plum Island’s fecal coliform counts held steady in the 2,000 range—three times the legal limit—and peaked to a shocking 20,000 during four separate monthly testing periods. Plum Island has been—and still is—flushing deadly exotic animal viruses along with the standard typhoid and diphtheria germs into coastal waters enjoyed by millions of people.
3 These are generous thresholds. Vermont, for example, sets 77 colonies of fecal coliform as that state’s acceptable maximum level for swimming.
In 1999, hundreds of thousands of lobsters in Long Island Sound mysteriously died, causing the New York–Connecticut lobster harvest to fall off virtually 100 percent that year. The die-off, which ended New York’s reign as the nation’s second largest lobster-producing state (behind only Maine), prompted the federal government to declare the event a “marine resource disaster.” Researchers pinpointed a parasitic paramoeba that kills off nerve tissue and a bacterial infection that causes “shell disease” as culprits, as well as large amounts of malathion from the 1999 West Nile virus pesticide sprayings seeping into the Long Island Sound. Surprisingly, no scientific efforts have been made to study the link between the two microbes and the fouled sewage flowing out of Plum Island.
Dr. Floyd Horn, the official in charge of all USDA research, said in 1998, “We’re not polluting the sound in any way. We heat the discharge to sterilize it and it goes into a treatment plant before it goes into the sound.” But one employee extensively involved with the process has a different response. “That stuff wasn’t killed off in the old system, and I’m not sure it’s killed off in the new system.” When the New York Observer questioned Dr. Jerry Crawford about the high levels of fecal coliform, he answered, “The location where the samples are taken has a tremendous number of turtles and geese.... They shit in the aeration pond . . . the shit has E. coli in it. Normal sewage treatment plants don’t have animals.”
Building 102 and the Plum Island wastewater treatment plant are not performing their critical functions. Instead, they pump thousands of gallons of virus- and bacteria-contaminated waste into the water. Consider this: a single bacterium that replicates itself in twenty minutes will be, within twelve hours, the parent of 16,777,216 new offspring. And that’s just a single germ out of billions and billions that make their way out of Plum Island each day. [I cannot believe they are going to put the Islands replacement in Kansas,it's like a bad wizard of oz bad joke DC]
PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE
After the EPA came down on Plum Island, an environmental company came over and drilled a number of monitoring wells twenty feet down in which it installed a pipe with a cap. Every month, “Steve Bosley” totes his collecting buckets and portable pump from well to well, unscrewing each cap and carefully snaking clear tubing about sixteen feet down each pipe. He then switches on the pump—“p-p-p-p-p-p-p”—which brings up what’s been accumulating way below the island’s surface. “I’m still pulling oil out of the wells,” Steve tells me. “I’m supposed to pull the sample until I run clear water. I’ve been running about four and a half gallons of No. 2 and No. 6 oil before I run clear water.” The No. 2 oil oozing out of Plum Island’s sandy underground is essentially diesel engine fuel; the No. 6 oil has the viscosity of tar. “Yes, I would say it runs pure oil for four gallons, then it turns creamy, then to white, then to swamp gas, then almost clear.”
Steve surmises, “We’ve had a bunch of busted pipes and leaking tanks. The oil must have permeated the whole ground.” He isn’t exaggerating. A 1992 internal USDA memorandum from the assistant secretary of agriculture notes “Over 40 underground storage tanks.... Most of these tanks are probably at least 30 years old. While tests of the drinking water have not indicated any problems to date, this could change overnight.” The memo urged action “as soon as possible,” but seven years later, nothing’s changed. The oil pockets below Plum Island coexist with pockets of clay and sand, as well as aquifers, or vast pockets of fresh water from which people obtain their drinking water through fourteen shallow wells. The aquifers, and other liquids like oil, do not remain fixed in one place. They move and often merge, according to geology experts. One drop of oil, dabbed on a blade of grass in the center of Long Island, will travel south and reach the Atlantic Ocean within twenty-five years. The pockets of oil Steve pumps from a well that’s sampling only a tiny portion will do the same thing. “That oil, in my opinion, is going to take the path of least resistance, go through the sand to the potable water,” says Steve.
THE GRAVY TRAIN
One of the ways Dr. Breeze kept his prized scientific recruits happy was through special non-salary compensation. For example, during overnights and weekends, a scientist would be stationed on the island as a duty officer to respond to animal or human emergencies. During the Callis era, duty officers were paid $60 for a weeknight and $160 for the weekend. “Basically, if there was a problem in the lab, you had to go in there, turn off a centrifuge, move stuff from a freezer or drop feed down the chute to the critters [test animals],” explains Dr. Carol House. But under Breeze, new scientists were assigned duty officer shifts and paid “some $600 to $700 a weekend to get in on the gravy train,” says one scientist. The role went from being the most dreaded to the most coveted.
“Danny Clewis” remembers a problem that occurred in Lab 257. Around 2:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, an alarm rang in the control room: the Box 6 freezer had gone down. As one of the overnight building operators, Danny went into the containment corridor to check on Box 6, and found the compressor shot and the freezer all but cooked. Normally stored at minus 158 degrees Fahrenheit, biologicals have to be shifted from the broken icebox into other freezers quickly or the germs will start to get pesky. Danny phoned the duty officer and told him Box 6 was out. “Well, he got very ornery with me,” says Danny, describing the reaction on the other end of the line. “He didn’t want to come down to assess the situation. He yelled at me that I woke him up and told me to do it myself.” Tact isn’t one of Danny Clewis’s strong points, because he shot back, “Listen, buddy, this is your responsibility, not ours—and you’re messing with the wrong guy.” He was right. Operating the building’s negative airflow systems and steam plant was Danny’s domain, but when it came to viruses and germs, they all looked the same to him.
The duty officer then asked, “Well, what do we usually do in this situation?”
“ ‘What do we do?’ I asked him back.” “What I do is usually call you— the duty officer, for Christ’s sake!”
The duty officer slogged down to Lab 257, and the two of them began unloading the contents of Box 6 to transfer them into other freezers. But it wasn’t all that easy. “We had biologicals in that freezer that were frozen and dated in the 1950s,” Danny recalls. “We opened the door and about half of them fell onto the floor.” Luckily, only a few tubes and flasks broke on the tile floor and spilled their contents; a Roccal disinfectant solution was brought in for the kill. The move then faced another obstacle—the other freezers were already overcrowded. One freezer was literally bursting at the seams with germs, so Danny wedged a two- by four-inch beam of plywood between it and a wall to keep its door shut. Each freezer has an attached log that records the exact contents of the materials kept inside. But Danny noticed the duty officer, all hot and bothered from being woken in the first place, haphazardly separating the carefully grouped test tubes and stuffing them into whatever freezer open space he could find. Without logging any of them. “He’s the boss,” Danny said to himself and shrugged.
Three weeks later, Danny got a phone call. “This one scientist wants to know where everything is, particularly all his samples. How the hell am I supposed to know? I told him to call up the duty officer from that night.”
The stories that circulated turned out to be more than grumbles of disgruntled workers. The facts proved that the USDA was grossly negligent, the workforce had looked the other way for years, and the public had been in the dark—in short, it proved that Plum Island was in disgraceful shape. Though some said the disclosures to the EPA, OSHA, and the news media were unwarranted, other workers and scientists believed the door needed to be opened wide. One employee laid his thinking bare when he explained, “You have to understand. If somebody took all this away from you, what would you do? You would be really pissed off and annoyed— you wouldn’t take a little revenge? I covered up for these people for years, and it would have cost them millions then. So I—and all the others—blew the whistle.” Says the former union leader Ed Hollreiser, “I never had a vendetta to close Plum Island down, but I wanted it run right. The contractor took shortcuts to save money, made more profits, and got lean, but then safety was compromised. Safety doesn’t need to be lean—it needs to be fat.”
For all the whistleblowers’ efforts in bringing these dreadful conditions to light, Plum Island remained—and remains—a real biological and environmental hazard.
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Meltdown
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