Lab 257
THE DISTURBING GOVERNMENT‘S SECRET STORY OF THE
GERM LABORATORY
BY MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER CARROLL
12
THE DISTURBING GOVERNMENT‘S SECRET STORY OF THE
GERM LABORATORY
BY MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER CARROLL
12
Meltdown
Look, I’m not a scientist—but to me, it was a biological
meltdown.
—PHILLIP PIEGARI, FORMER EMPLOYEE
Friday, August 16, 1991, 12:00 p.m.— A tropical depression formed
from a cluster of tightly packed thunderstorms just east of the
Bahamas, and it gradually intensified throughout the day and
overnight. By late Saturday afternoon, it became a “tropical cyclone
with winds that exceed seventy-four miles per hour and circulate
counterclockwise about its center,” otherwise known as a hurricane.
When a storm officially becomes a hurricane, the National Hurricane
Center gives it a name. The names are handed out in alphabetical order
to delineate how many have come before it that hurricane season; this
second hurricane of the season was simply named “Bob.” Like many
hurricanes originating in this region, Bob plowed north by northeast,
following a path parallel to the East Coast of the United States. With
each passing hour, the hurricane’s intensity accelerated. As Saturday
slipped into Sunday, Bob came within 30 miles of Cape Hatteras, packing winds over 115 miles per hour. Minimum barometric pressure was
957 mb. Out of five possible levels, Bob was classified as a Category-3
(CAT-3) hurricane, a storm capable of extensive damage. The hurricane
spiraled on, gaining strength as it went.
Saturday, August 17, 6:00 p.m.— Phillip Piegari sat down for dinner
with his family in his modest Jamesport, Long Island, home. Jamesport is
one of ten tiny hamlets along Route 25, a countrified area dotted with truck
farms, vineyards, colonial bed-and-breakfasts, and ubiquitous yard sale signs.
Phillip’s wife, Zyta, born and raised in Ecuador, set out a delicious dinner for Phillip and their two young boys, Peter and Matthew, who immediately dug in. Phillip halted their progress by loudly clearing his throat. He
then recited a solemn blessing, like he did before every meal.
On this night, however, talk at the dinner table was not the usual chatter about school, weekend fishing plans on their modest boat, or the
upcoming family vacation. All talk, and quiet thoughts, centered on the
hurricane. The television in the family room was on, blathering faint
sounds about the violent storm spiraling up the East Coast, headed straight
for Long Island. Because the 118-mile long land mass extends out at a right
angle from the coastline, it has forever borne the brunt force of tropical
storms that come north and hug the coast. During one recent December
nor’easter, for example, the ocean flooded over the Hamptons barrier beach
island and met the bay. When it retreated, it gouged two new inlets and over
forty million-dollar beachfront homes were destroyed; the road now comes
to a screeching halt at a rushing ocean inlet, and then continues on the other
side. The Piegaris listened from the kitchen as the nightly news anchors
instructed people to board up windows, take fragile items off of shelves,
and stand in the frames of doorways when the storm hit. Heeding the
warnings, earlier in the day, Phillip took the boat out of the water and
picked up large bottles of water. He packed the freezer with extra ice. Zyta
pulled her fragile crockery off the shelves.
The Piegari family was particularly concerned because the hurricane was
headed directly for the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Phillip was due
to report there in just a few hours for the graveyard shift. For twelve years
now, he had been a ferryboat seaman and building maintenance engineer on
Plum Island. Phillip had experienced rough weather conditions on the island
before; he felt confident he and the men on the late-night shift would see this
storm safely through, just like all the others. He assured Zyta and the boys he
would be fine and admonished them to stay indoors during the storm.
At forty-four years old, Phillip cut a slight frame at five feet, six inches
tall. But his small size and reddish-brown mop-top belied the man on the
inside. From 1967 to 1973, Phillip sailed around the globe six times as an
able-bodied seaman with the U.S. Merchant Marine, and saw heavy combat
action in the Vietnam War. After he returned home, he enlisted in the
marine division of the Army Corps of Engineers. Others might shrink
from the risk of that night’s assignment, but Phillip was hardly afraid. He
had a job to do, an important responsibility on Plum Island, and a sacred
obligation to provide for his family. To a combat veteran, it was just another
day on the job.
Sunday, August 19, 12:00 a.m.— Piegari and the men of B Crew arrived
on the island. They were shuttled over on the Plum Isle, one of three
government-operated ferries used to transport scientists and staff to and
from the facility. Unknown to the passengers, but likely known to the
USDA, the old Plum Isle had recently failed a Coast Guard inspection and
was not certified to carry passengers. The other two ferries were tied up in
safe anchorage at the New London, Connecticut, naval submarine base.
Lack of certification notwithstanding, the Plum Isle was the only vessel
available to transport workers during the storm. It made the trip over rough
waters without incident.
B Crew, three men and a foreman, normally pulled an eight-hour
graveyard shift. But unlike previous routine shifts, that night they had to
support and maintain Laboratory 257 while a hurricane passed overhead.
Piegari recalls the crew’s mission early that Sunday: “We were operating the
building as usual. We had certain responsibilities. For example, we had to
maintain steam in the building. We had a constant flow of water that had to
be treated as sewage. We had to regulate and monitor the air pressure in the
building, to see that we hold negative pressure biocontainment. We had to
monitor the freezers to see they were the proper temperature. We constantly patrolled the building to make sure we weren’t losing anything, in
the way of our systems.”
Upon their arrival, the crew drove along narrow winding dirt trails to
Lab 257. Lab 257 was a long, rectangular building with three-foot-thick
reinforced concrete walls and a flat, black tar roof. Tiny porthole windows
cut into the whitewashed walls and circled near the top of the building
every twenty feet. The windows were recessed deep within the building’s
walls. Little light shined through, for they were caked with the grime and
coarse sea salt that had accumulated over eighty years’ time. The building
was surrounded by a four-foot high cement wall, and a rusted barbed wire
fence encircled the compound. Entering the building through the air lock,
B Crew was greeted by the shift’s first problem—the hot water coil broke.
The coil runs on electric power and generates steam for the building. Second
in importance only to electricity, steam is an essential resource for the lab’s
smooth operation; it is needed to heat the building, treat contaminated animal sewage, and produce hot water for decontamination showers. It must
constantly be kept on-line. Within a short time, the crew repaired the coil,
and steam pressure was restored. The next few hours were relatively quiet.
Sunday, August 18, 7:00 a.m.— Hurricane Bob’s tentacles stretched from
Maryland’s eastern shore of the Chesapeake all the way up to Cape Cod.
Storm surges of more than eight feet rocked boats clear off their moorings,
knocked down homes along the shoreline, and shaved off fifty feet of coastline. Seas were far beyond navigable. They were awash in choppy whitecaps, tall wave crests, and deep troughs.
The storm swirled around the eye of the hurricane, a core about twenty
miles wide. Within it, conditions were relatively calm, with a lull in wind
velocity. But this brief pause lasted barely long enough for victims to brace
themselves for the calamity on the other side of the eye.
Around 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, Bob’s eye unpredictably twisted further
east, heading straight for Block Island, about twenty-five miles due east of
Plum Island.
At this time—with the worst of the storm still yet to come—Lab 257
went dark.
The laboratory’s basement held the boilers, sewage treatment plant, and
main mechanical room containing air-handling and monitoring equipment to prevent viruses from escaping. The sewage plant “cooked” raw,
contaminated wastewater to kill off any live biological agents. On Lab
257’s first floor were the laundry and glassware storage rooms, glassware
sterilization unit, incinerator, decontamination rooms, and air locks,
through which everyone passed in order to enter and exit the lab. It also
contained the 120-Area. The 120-Area was the “hottest” part of the building, the site of the most dangerous, infectious virus research. This area was
equipped with a series of freezers filled with liquid nitrogen, pumped in
from an outdoor tank that kept temperatures at a frosty minus 158 degrees
Fahrenheit. The freezers housed biological materials used in the lab—
tissue samples riddled with viruses, bacteria, experimental cultures, and
vaccines.
Research laboratories and the animal holding rooms were on Lab 257’s
second floor. When the Army refitted this former mine storage building, it
slapped a sheet metal livestock chute onto the side of Lab 257 to herd animals into the second-floor animal rooms. By the hundreds, cattle, pigs,
sheep, horses, goats, llamas, and other quadrupeds were herded up the
ramp, through the doors, and into the second-floor holding pens. This
floor housed the autopsy room, where animals were dissected and experiments performed on carcasses. When the dissection was through, lab workers shoved the diseased animal carcasses into a disposal chute, which
dumped them into the incinerator one floor below, where they were cremated at temperatures exceeding 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The hot cremation exhaust ran through a filtered chimney on the roof and then poured
out of the building in thick black tufts.
Lab 257 was a self-contained operation that functioned separately from
the rest of Plum Island. For the animals, it was a one-way operation—animals that entered the lab never left alive. Engineered to prevent harmful viruses
and other biological toxins from escaping, the lab’s sustaining lifeblood was
electric power. Electricity was needed to run the sewage decontamination
plant, to create steam in decontamination rooms, to power the freezers,
and—most important—to run the building’s negative air pressure system,
the cornerstone of Lab 257’s biological containment system.
Simply put, electric power was the building’s most precious resource.
Without it, Lab 257 morphed from a safe research facility into an extremely
dangerous biological threat.
As the hurricane swirled closer, strong winds blew down power lines on
Long Island. Normally, Plum Island’s power was supplied by the
Long Island Lighting Company, via an undersea cable on the ocean floor.
But the LILCO power grid shorted out and mainland power to the island
laboratory failed. Fortunately, there was a backup plan. Oil-fired power
generators kicked in at Building 103, the Plum Island emergency power
plant, and supplied the island with electricity. The huge generators in Building 103 were old, but they were well maintained and effective.
Building 103 supplied Lab 257 with power through overhead power
lines and through underground cables that provided “redundancy.” Typically, if one power conduit failed, the other was switched on as a backup so
power could continue uninterrupted. This Sunday, however, redundancy
wasn’t given a chance.
Hurricane winds, gusting over one hundred miles per hour, toppled the
island’s overhead electric poles. “They fell over like they were as light as
toothpicks,” recalls Dave Stakey, in a scratchy smoker’s voice. A genial,
slightly disheveled man, he sports a long ponytail and diamond studs in
each ear. As one of the island’s longtime electrical engineers, Stakey knew
the island like the back of his hand.
With the wires down, workers in Building 103 threw the wide jumper
switches that engaged the emergency generators. After a series of flickering
lights, all of the island’s buildings were back on-line except one—Lab 257.
Earlier that morning in 257, the power went down a few times. Explains
Phillip, “It was intermittent and then it came back steady. But then the
lights started to slowly dim.” At this point, B Crew member Stanley
“Shine” Mickaliger, a twenty-year veteran of Plum Island, was not sure if
power was coming back. But he was hopeful. A sixty-one-year-old master
plumber, Mickaliger joined Plum Island after years in the trade. Of Polish
extraction, Shine—called “Sunshine” for his ever-grinning as a boy—grew
up in Riverhead, the youngest of nine. “For this short period of time,” says
Shine, “we were thinking the [emergency] generators would come on-line. ‘Why are they gone?’ we all wondered. In the past, we had power failures
where we’d been out for an hour or two at most.”
But this time, things were different. After two hours without power,
their worst fears came true. They radioed the power plant and learned that
emergency power was being pumped into all buildings on the island, yet
the lights were still out in Lab 257. B Crew gathered together in the boiler
room in quiet disbelief. At around 8:00 a.m., Shine broke the silence and
delivered the grim news. “Guys, the overhead is gone—that’s it, guys, we’re
out.” The members of the team shifted uncomfortably and exchanged troubled glances. They knew they were on their own.
Just a few feet beyond the eerie yellow glow of their flashlights lay the
end of the universe. Everything past it—all of Lab 257—was pitch-black.
Ordinarily, working overnights in the lab was akin to “being in a tin can,”
says Shine. “After everyone went home, it was just the few of us in that big
building, all alone.” The building usually had a low, steady hum to it,
sounds of boilers heating, steam pumping, fans turning, and light fixtures
buzzing. That was the sound accompanying the men on graveyard shift
every night since Lab 257 opened for business way back in 1954. Now there
was a different sound. The distinctive “sound” of utter silence in the dark.
And man’s worst fears were all around.
Three months prior to Hurricane Bob, in a flurry of sparks and a wisp of
gray smoke, one of the underground conductors shorted out; with it
went the underground cable as a source of electricity. Dave Stakey, who
was working on the island that night, restored power. “I was on duty the
night the cable went. It was an ‘uh-oh,’ and then we put [Lab 257] on the
overheads.” Standard operating procedure called for using the underground cable as 257’s primary power source, while the overhead lines were
used as an emergency standby. So for the past three months, Lab 257 had
been running on its emergency feed, the overhead transmission lines. “We
no longer had an alternative means of supplying the building,” says Stakey.
The emergency backup had become the only option.
In full-time use, the overhead power lines went down about once a
month. “We had this continuous problem on the overheads, because you had
birds flying into them,” Stakey says. “We would get Canadian geese—and
occasionally an osprey—flying into the lines and shorting them out, either
from phase-to-phase or phase-to-ground.” In the orange-purple tint of dusk,
the great fish hawks swooped down, grasping sharp sticks to build nests on
the cross-arms of the poles, and sometimes the sticks sliced into the wires,
causing short circuits. To rectify the problem, New York Telephone erected
nesting poles back in the 1950s to lure the birds away from telephone and power lines, but it never worked; it actually increased the number of nesting
places and expanded the flocks. An engineer from the early days said that
during 1954, the year Lab 257 opened for business, adult ospreys had flown
into power lines and momentarily knocked out the power to the laboratory
no less than three times.
The island’s top brass knew about the damaged underground cable
because B Crew’s foreman, Walt Sinowski, Stakey, and the other “electrics”
told them. According to Shine, every time Sinowski began the shift, he penciled into the Lab 257 logbook, “underground still out—not
repaired.” Underground power and telephone cables had blown out
before and were promptly repaired. But this time, management flatly
refused to repair Lab 257’s electrical umbilical cord.
Though the 1991 budget was invested in items like a new ferry service
to Connecticut and a new gym, Dr. Breeze and his facility manager, Ernest
Escorsica, thought replacing the cable was too expensive. The cost: $70,000.
It would have to wait for next year’s budget. An appeal to Washington for
emergency funds could have been sought, but no such appeal was made. In
a letter after the hurricane to Congressman George Hochbrueckner, Dr.
Breeze wrote matter-of-factly, “We made the decision not to replace the
underground cable which provides power to Lab 257 immediately after it
shorted out... because overhead power lines to the building were available
and all [fiscal year 1991] funds had been committed.” Apparently, Dr.
Breeze was unable to appreciate the damage hurricane winds could have on
overhead power lines, or the need for backup electric power to ensure biological safety.
Plum Island deputy Jerry Crawford conceded the government’s misjudgment when he later blundered to reporters that “in an operation of this
size, something can fall through the cracks.” But, Dr. Crawford added, he
did not feel that the lack of backup power was critical to the maintenance of
Lab 257. To electrician Dave Stakey, however, the power going down was
beyond inexcusable. “We had our generators at the power plant,” he
laments. “We certainly had enough fuel. We could’ve given them power if
we had a way to get it to them.”
So without a working underground cable or on-site power generator,
Lab 257 remained at the mercy of flimsy overhead lines and their questionable reliability.
For this gross negligence, a terrible price would be paid.
Sunday, August 18, 8:00 a.m.— Bob’s winds howled louder with each
passing hour. Rain poured down like a shower of falling nails. The ground
shook with each thunderbolt. Waves that normally rolled gently onto the
island’s beaches now crashed high upon the shore, spraying water thirty five feet into the air and flooding low-lying areas. Just three hundred feet
from the coast, B Crew huddled in total darkness inside Lab 257. They
heard low, rumbling sounds and felt the muted vibrations of the hurricane,
protected by the lab’s three-foot-thick masonry walls. But inside the building, a deadlier storm was brewing.
After the power went out, each crew member grabbed two heavy-duty
flashlights, stuffed one in each pocket, and the men split up and patrolled
the building. To maintain biological containment in 257, B Crew needed to
preserve sewage treatment, storage freezers, steam, and negative air pressure. Plum Island biological safety regulations call for a much larger crew
during a storm of Hurricane Bob’s magnitude, yet there were no reinforcements. Even with electric power, maintaining the building during the storm
wouldn’t be easy. Without power, it was futile. But there was no time for
the men to dwell on that. They rose to the occasion, strong, handy men,
resolved to handle the crisis as quickly and efficiently as possible. Lightning
bolts flashed through the third-floor windows like strobes, briefly illuminating the hallways and lab rooms and casting ghostly shadows just before
darkness set in again. Muffled through thick animal room doors, grunts and
groans became noticeable to the ears of B Crew. The test animals, already
moaning from the painful symptoms of deliberate viral infections, wailed
loudly in fear, sensing the turmoil within the lab and the wretched storm
outside. With the chillers down and no working ventilation fans, temperatures climbed over 100 degrees.
Sunday, August 18, 9:30 a.m.— By now, B Crew should have been
relieved by the next shift, but travel between Plum Island and the mainland
was completely cut off. Trapped by the raging storm, the crew continued to
work feverishly inside Lab 257. While patrolling the ground floor of the
building, Phillip’s and Shine’s shoes suctioned to the floor and made squishing noises with each step as they progressed down the hallway. Though
he’d rather not have known what lay beneath, Shine instinctively moved his
flashlight to the ground to investigate. He saw a thick layer of sludge coating the floor. It was rising rapidly. “Leaking wastewater,” Shine figured.
“There was overflowing sewage on the floor,” Phillip remembers. “It was
awful—because there was no place for it to go.”
The sewage treatment in Lab 257 is based on a simple principle: heat
kills. When cooked to a temperature that no living organism can withstand, bacteria and viruses are killed or permanently deactivated. Contaminated animal waste—blood, pus, sputum, saliva, vomit, feces, urine—from
the second-floor lab rooms is drained through the beveled floor and piped downstairs to a thousand-gallon sewage holding tank. While that’s a lot of
sewage, the tank’s capacity is still finite. “When you lose your power, your
tank still fills up,” notes Shine. “The animals in the labs are continuously
throwing off water and waste.” A single cow excretes over a hundred pounds
of waste in a single day, and there were droves of them in Lab 257, all ailing
with viruses. If the waste fills this primary tank, additional fluid is routed
automatically to a smaller secondary overflow tank. It is transferred by
means of an industrial pump that is fueled by electric power. “Regardless of
power—this emergency tank is critical,” Shine says.
As Hurricane Bob raged outside, Lab 257’s sewage tank filled rapidly.
With no emergency backup power, the overflow waste could not be
redirected to the second tank. Shine read the gauges on the tanks, which
remained operational despite the loss of electric power. “We’re monitoring
the gauges—they’re still working—and it’s getting up there. Way up there,”
Shine remembers. “We realized we needed to make provisions. We had to
do something about this tank.” If the crew didn’t act fast, contaminated
sewage would seep everywhere. For the workers trapped inside the lab,
there would be no escaping the consequences.
But it was too late.
Instead of bursting, the primary tank released contaminated waste
through an emergency drainpipe. The waste spilled over, onto the floor.
Shine and Phillip, wearing only gloves and rubber boots, mopped up the
raw, infectious muck and worked frantically, trying to keep it from accumulating. If they paused even for a moment, they knew they would end up
knee-deep in . . . God only knew what. They had to get the overflow problem under control or the basement of Lab 257 would soon be flooded in a
sea of dangerous viral and bacterial biological matter. Contamination would
escape the building, release into the outside air, and seep into the ground.
Searching in the dark through an equipment room upstairs, Phillip
found an old, small gas pump and rushed it down to the basement. Phillip
and Shine attempted to start it, but each time they pulled the cord, the
pump sputtered, letting out a “p-p-p-p-p” and stopped. Taking turns, one
held the flashlight while the other tinkered with the pump. Sludge continued to flow out of the drainpipe and onto the floor. The pungent odor emanating from the floor began to overwhelm the men. They stepped back for
a break, gagging, and cupped their hands over their noses and mouths.
Government safety requirements mandated that face respirators be worn
for this type of work, and respirator units were available upstairs in the utility closet. But B Crew and the other workers had never been trained by the
safety office to use them.
Standing in a torrent of rising sewage, they willed themselves to withstand the stench and returned to the pump. Resourcefully, they ran a hose
from the primary to the secondary tank, using the makeshift pump to
bypass the normal electrical system. They fired up the pump, and it
coughed and splattered liquid in their faces. Then it slowly kicked into gear
and began to suck the sewage into the overflow tank. Phillip expressed
relief with a thumbs-up, and Shine gave him a high-five. As Phillip and
Shine admired their rapid patch job, two of the other crewmen entered the
room. It’s beautiful! It’s running beautiful, thought Shine, viewing their
successful handiwork; while wiping beads of contamination off his face, he
looked behind him and saw his co-workers. “Get the hell out of here!” he
yelled at them. He and Phillip had already been in the room too long as it
was. There was no reason why anyone else should be exposed to the puddles of sludge.
Sunday, August 18, 10:30 a.m.— The eye of Hurricane Bob passed
directly over Block Island, twenty-five miles east of Plum Island. Inside the
eye, winds were relatively calm, but the storm reached its maximum intensity just past the edge of the eye, in an area known as the “eye wall.” On
Block Island, wind speed at the eye wall was recorded at 105 mph, but that
was inaccurate. The equipment couldn’t record any higher. As the outside
of the eye wall battered Plum Island, wind speed at the hurricane’s most
powerful point could only be imagined.
A long, deafening alarm screamed out in three bursts, paused for a long
second, then screamed out again. It echoed through the dark hallways of
Lab 257: “AAANNN... AAANNN... AAANNN... ” It was the freezer
alarm. “AAANNN... AAANNN... AAANNN.”
The freezers were melting.
With the power out, temperatures in the electric freezers rose from
their subzero levels. Inside the freezers, virus samples and experiments are
kept in vials and Petri dishes at minus 158 degrees Fahrenheit. If the temperature rises high enough, biological samples stir in their dishes, activate,
and multiply into lethal predators. Highly infectious viruses attach themselves to air particles and travel freely through the air before attaching to a
host animal. Inside these freezers, on this cold, dark night, were cultures
containing the germs that cause African swine fever, foot-and-mouth disease, Nairobi sheep disease and Rift Valley fever, among scores of other
plagues—many infectious and communicable to humans. Some of the cultures were five decades old. All were living pathogens. For many of the
germs, all it took was one short breath to become infected.
“We had freezers thawing out all over the place. Puddles from freezers
were going down floor drains,” remembers Phillip. During a previous era, this accident would have been easily rectified. “We used to have this canister,” says Shine, “a special single canister, and go to the outside tank and fill
it up with liquid nitrogen. We would hook that canister up to the freezers
and get the temperature down if we needed to.” But now, no such luck. The
portable canister was missing—it was removed from Lab 257 some time ago
and never returned. Like emergency power and the safety respirators, the
island was loaded with resources. And the workers had no way to use them.
All the men could do to counter the oozing biological freezers was
mop up the puddles of liquid thaw into wastewater drains, keep the freezer
doors shut, and pray for the storm to subside.
Sunday, August 18, 12:30 p.m.— A pungent odor began to permeate Lab
257. The doors leading into the “hot” areas—the 120-Area, the other lab
rooms, and the animal rooms—are surrounded by rubber gaskets. The gaskets form a hermetic seal between contaminated air inside the hot rooms
and clean air circulating throughout the rest of the building. An electric air
compressor powers the gaskets; but since the power outage, the door gaskets were slowly deflating as air seeped out of them. While the freezer
alarms continued screaming loudly through Lab 257, new buzzer alarms
signaled a breach in the air-lock seals. Polluted air from within the lab and
animal rooms began to mingle with clean air circulating through the rest of
the building. “Walt Sinowski was after management for years and years,”
Phillip remembers, “to install an outside air compressor or an outside tank,
in the event this might happen. You know, to prevent this type of thing.”
With the door gaskets deflated, the rank odor of infected air wafted
through the hallways. It flowed under the nostrils of healthy animals and
the men of B Crew. The stench was even more potent near the animal
rooms. Normally, the crew checks on the animals periodically by entering
the animal wing and peering through the doors’ thick glass windows, protected by the inflated gaskets. Entering the animal wing of Lab 257, the men
were overcome by the smell of decaying, diseased animals. “We had this
odor all over us,” Phillip says. “It was just awful—it can’t be described.”
The animals let out guttural wails and cries for help when they sensed the
workers trying to check up on them. To top it off, a failed ventilation system contributed to the air-lock breach. “There was no venting over these
animals, and the door gaskets were gone,” recalls Phillip, who pauses and
blankly stares into space with a look of disbelief. “On the floor there were
animal droppings. There was urine. Everything was there to see, right there
on the floor. We were breathing in all of this stuff.” Shine concurs: “It was
coming through the doors and ductwork and there was nothing to prevent
it, nothing.” The men were forced to turn back.
The men of B Crew were defenseless—with no means of protecting themselves, except to stay clear of the animal wing. Outside the building
was no better, with a CAT-3 hurricane pummeling the island. “What could
we possibly do?” Phillip asks, defeatedly. “We did everything we could to
save this building.” In the midst of the escalating calamity, crew members
summoned the strength to remain levelheaded, at least on the outside.
A 1956 USDA film trumpeting Plum Island called the then revolutionary negative air control system “an ingenious device” and a
“wonder in itself.” Because of this, “viruses stand no chance of getting out.”
Negative air can be best described as a series of supply and exhaust fans.
One huge supply fan draws air from the outside, then circulates it through
the building with a series of vents. At the other end of the building, a large
exhaust fan expels the air through an enormous battery of air filters. A
series of air dampers regulates the flow of air in and out of each contaminated room. Slightly adjusting a room’s air dampers can throw the entire
building out of balance; miscalibrated, and you can actually draw water out
of a toilet. Lab 257’s “hottest” room, the 120-Area, has the strongest negative air pressure, and the animal and other lab rooms share similar high negative pressure. For this elaborate system to function properly, it
requires two things: outside air vents to allow air to flow freely in and out
of the building, and an electric current to turn the fan motors.
Sunday, August 18, 3:00 p.m.— Since their arrival at midnight, the crew
had taken gauge readings every hour. The gauges monitor Lab 257’s negative air pressure system, the foundation of the building’s biological containment system. The dials are supposed to display the amount of negative air
pressure in each lab room, like a speedometer measures speed. But the
gauges inside Lab 257 were hit or miss. “Two-fifty-seven was a mess—it was
always breaking down,” says an employee familiar with the system. “An
older-type gauge and a newer-type gauge measuring the same room would
give two different numbers.” Tapping the glass only made the gauge needles
sway from side to side, before resting at a randomly inaccurate number.
When the power went down, the normal hum of the fans declined in
pitch to a chopping noise that faded with each revolution until the
fans ground to a halt. The needles on the monitoring dials began to fall. The
twenty-four-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year containment system failed. With
the negative pressure system off and the door gaskets blown, air particles
escaped and traveled the path of least resistance, from contaminated areas to
the outside.
The Army engineers who built Lab 257 came up with a fail-safe mechanism for such an emergency. The air vents that allow air in and out of the
building were fitted with outside “air dampers.” If the system failed, these
air dampers were designed to close, locking “bad” air inside the lab. But
like so many other controls on the night of Hurricane Bob, the outside
dampers faltered. “They were frozen in an open position—and we couldn’t
move them,” says Shine. Given the USDA’s abysmal record on Plum Island
safety, they weren’t checked periodically or adequately maintained. The
strong hurricane winds might have broken them off or simply prevented
them from closing. Biological containment was completely jeopardized.
The men, realizing with horror that containment was entirely lost,
rubbed their eyes in disbelief. “There were insects in the building—we saw
them,” Phillip recalls with a pained expression. With the system down, airborne insects—mosquitoes, flies, moths, all in abundance on the feral
island—burrowed through the air vents into the laboratory building to
escape the storm. Inside, the insects mingled with disease animals, spoiled
air, and contaminated raw sewage. They flew freely in and out of the building during and after the hurricane.
“We had no power—there’s no on-site generator at 257. They had
everything we needed, everything in 103 [the emergency power plant]. We
had our incinerator, our own boilers—and”—Shine’s voice is trembling,
and the husky engineer is choked up probing the memories—“give us
something, an old pump outside, even a lawn mower engine. Something—
something for us to help—ya know?”
Phillip interrupts to cool him down. “Look, I’m not a scientist,
but . . .” he confesses, head in his hands. Advanced degree or not, Phillip
can relate what he saw, what he heard and smelled, how he felt. And he
knows in his heart and in his head it wasn’t good.
“. . . to me, it was a biological meltdown.”
Sunday, August 18, early evening— The eye of the hurricane slammed
the coast of Rhode Island. On Plum Island, B Crew was physically
exhausted and mentally defeated after doing everything humanly possible
to maintain Lab 257 for eighteen consecutive hours, a period that seemed an
eternity. Ravenous with hunger, after witnessing sewage spills, melting
freezers, and the failure of the biocontainment system, no one was foolish
enough to pick at the food in the lunchroom refrigerator, fearing they might
be ingesting contamination. Then their radios chirped. It was a worker from
the power plant. The sump pump that normally flushes out leaks was overwhelmed by gushing floodwaters. There was heavy flooding, and they
needed help fast. Phillip agreed to brave the storm and lend a hand. He figured he could also pick up food for the crew, since the power plant’s provisions were presumably safe. Preparing for the trek, he religiously followed
the normal laboratory decontamination procedures. At this point it was a
laughably futile exercise.
Upon entering a change room with his flashlight, Phillip stripped naked
in the dark. He removed his wedding band and his crucifix. He
entered the shower room, felt around for the knobs and the soap, and
showered for about three minutes. “I took the standard shower,” Phillip
says, “but the water wasn’t nearly up to temperature—it was barely lukewarm. Remember, we had no power and no steam.” He scrubbed his skin
vigorously, spat, and squeezed his nose and blew air through his ears. He
cleansed his fingernails with a special nail file, then donned “clean” clothes
in the change room on the other side.
“I was allowed to leave by the duty officer, who gave me permission,”
says Phillip. “He was in charge of the whole operation—he said go and eat
and try to bring ‘clean’ food back to the men in 257. By that time, we had
been in there for eighteen hours.” That duty officer was Dr. William
Lagreid. Only recently hired to join the island’s scientific research staff, Dr.
Lagreid was stationed in the duty officer’s quarters, on the east side of the
island, far from Lab 257. His new position put him first in command of the
island with full responsibility over any laboratory accidents or mishaps.
During Hurricane Bob, Dr. Lagreid was the only scientist on Plum Island.
It is certainly puzzling that director Dr. Breeze appointed this rookie solely
in charge after receiving a hurricane warning. A more experienced duty
officer might have evacuated Lab 257 prior to the hurricane.
Outside 257, Phillip was thrust into the tail of the hurricane. Somehow,
he clawed his way along the road through the island’s forest to the power
plant. The journey, which usually takes a few minutes, now required considerable time and effort. He threw his full body weight against the
100 mph winds and shielded himself from driving rains, which pelted his
face. He hurled himself over large trees and debris strewn across the dirt
path; the trail looked like a battle zone, a winding maze he navigated in the
rainy dark. Phillip drew a deep sigh of relief upon reaching the power plant.
Though he was soaked to the bone, he shook himself dry and got to work.
Phillip and the others barricaded the east door to impede the water rushing
into the electrical gear room. They bailed out the water, using small buckets, which prevented the generator from shorting out and avoided a power
outage to Lab 101 and the rest of the island. Mission accomplished, Phillip
moved on to his second task. In the power plant’s well-lit kitchen, he prepared an uninfected feast of sandwiches, brewed a pot of coffee, and
wrapped up the rations securely. Without wasting a moment, he made his way back to deliver the provisions to the B Crew. As he reentered the Lab
257 air-lock door, his co-workers cheered Phillip’s triumphant return.
Monday, August 19, 12:00 a.m.— Hurricane Bob lost much of its strength
after it left Plum Island and made landfall on Rhode Island. It continued on
a northeastern path, past Boston, and up the coast of Maine. Eventually it
spun across the Atlantic Ocean and broke apart off the coast of England.
Back on the island, the alarms died out. The frazzled men of B Crew
heroically weathered twenty-four hours working inside Lab 257; it was now
sixteen hours after their normal shift ended. Amazingly, they were not
relieved. It would be another eight hours before they were. Ferry transportation was still impossible, as the Plum Isle could not brave the violent waters
without risk of capsizing. High crosswinds prevented helicopters from flying
safely. A tired and dazed B Crew spent the next eight hours repairing leaking steam pipes. “We’re going around, making sure doors were closed, looking for water from contracting pipes after we lost our steam. Water is all over
the place, we’re tightening every pump packing and every flange.” The
utterly exhausted men, with weary eyes slogged about the cavernous hallways, armed with their now-dimmed flashlights and thick adjustable pipe
wrenches. The sounds of the storm gradually dwindled. Except for a sporadic
groan, the animals quieted down, and the building systems remained down.
“We were in complete silence,” remembers Phillip. “When the building runs
normally, you never seem to notice the sounds of leaks—and then, with
everything quiet, you can hear water dripping—drip, drop, drip... drip....”
Monday, August 19, 8:00 a.m.— B Crew was finally relieved and the next
crew, A Crew, took over. Shine remembers the scene. “When we left, there
was no need for decon [decontamination]. The water in Lab 257 was ice
cold. What would be the point? We took our outside clothes, put them on,
went down to the guardhouse, took a cold shower there to be safe, and
went home.”
“We brought contaminated clothes off the island,” says Phillip. It
hardly mattered after the collapse of Lab 257’s biological containment systems. After this harrowing work shift on Plum Island, the safety regulations were utterly pointless to the men of B Crew.
Tuesday, August 20, 12:00 a.m.— Management refused to offer the crew,
held virtual prisoners for thirty-two hours in the chaos of Lab 257, any
respite. The fatigued men reported to work for another graveyard shift.
“Management didn’t exactly say, ‘Guys, you really broke your hump in
there—great job,’ ” says Phillip. “They didn’t offer to send us to a doctor to
be checked.”
B Crew’s valiant efforts were belatedly praised in a letter dated September 17, 1991, by R. D. Plowman, head of Agricultural Research Service, the
arm of the USDA that ran Plum Island. It commended the B Crew for its
“quick and decisive action taken . . . to prevent damage—possibly even a
blackout—at PIADC [Plum Island Animal Disease Center] during Hurricane Bob.” Possibly even a blackout? They had been using flashlights in the
dark for thirty-two hours. Dr. Plowman then concluded, “I want to personally thank you for your hard work and courage in the face of such a
dangerous situation.”
That same day, the men received another letter.
“As a result of the A-76 [federal government privatization] process, it
has become necessary to conduct a Reduction In Force. Your position has
been specifically identified for abolishment, and you [are] to be
released. . . .”
As part of the USDA’s efforts to cut costs, Plum Island laid off the men
of B Crew.
Great job, men.
You’re fired.
Established when the facility began operations a half-century ago, the comprehensive Plum Island biological safety manual sets forth explicit “Emergency Hurricane Procedures.” Lying in perhaps the most vulnerable spot in the northeast hurricane corridor, Plum Island played host to violent fall weather as soon as the USDA arrived—and long before. Storms in the 1700s and 1800s wrecked numerous schooners on its rocks, whose victims’ bodies (often anonymous) were buried on the island; during the 1950s, said an old employee, every day after a rough storm hit, another person resigned from staff. A gale swept through the east end in November of 1953 as finishing touches were being put on Lab 257. Much like Bob, this storm struck Plum Island dead on with devastating force. Tidal waves rushed in from Gardiner’s Bay, wrecking one of the Army’s boats and flooding three feet deep against Lab 257’s four-foot concrete barrier, recently installed and dried. The T-boat was found the next day, dragged across the beach and broken to pieces. Channels connecting the marshy ponds with the bay were cut wide open from waves. Seawater flooded in, creating a brackish environment that not only threatened the freshwater wells, but could shear off twenty acres at Pine Point and erase the land buffer between Lab 257 and the ocean. Awaiting the inevitable destruction of the next nor’easter, the Army Corps of Engineers sandbagged the channels shut and filled the area with tons of jetty rocks. Though Lab 257 was saved, the close call should have called into question—before its doors opened—the decision to locate a germ lab on the island’s southwest shore. A Plum Island hurricane inundation table shows Lab 257 completely inundated with water during a CAT-3 hurricane’s twelve-foot surge elevations.
Knowing firsthand the potential for disaster, the scientists who founded the animal disease laboratory on Plum Island drew up the hurricane emergency plan:
The aftermath conditions of a severe storm or other natural caused disaster could severely limit or prevent the emergency operations of facilities.... Potential breaching of the agent contaminant aspects of [Plum Island] facilities and escape of disease agents could also occur in this type of emergency condition.
Upon issuance of a twenty-four-hour hurricane warning by the National Weather Service, procedures dictate securing laboratory buildings to protect against damage. This includes covering all windows with one-quarter inch plywood and sandbagging buildings to minimize water damage in low-lying areas. The emergency plan specifically mentions sandbagging Lab 257, but when Hurricane Bob was on its way, no one sandbagged 257 or the power plant. Because of this oversight, the power plant flooded. It was only through the ingenuity and hard work of men like Phillip Piegari that the generators were saved, averting the loss of power to the entire island and a far greater catastrophe.
In addition to securing the buildings, the emergency procedures mandated additional safety measures for approaching hurricanes:
a. Water tower must be filled to capacity;
b. All underground electrical feeders shall be utilized;
c. Stand-by generators must be operational and be attended by competent operators;
d. All sewage in Buildings #102 and #257 must be processed and tanks emptied; and
e. Employees must be advised to have food, water, prescription medicines, etc., within their respective work stations.
Management failed to follow these procedures after receiving the hurricane warning for Hurricane Bob. In fact, they didn’t follow a single one. Item a. simply did not occur. Items b. and c. were impossible, thanks to management’s disregard of safety when it failed to repair Lab 257’s underground power cable. If procedure d. had been followed, sewage would not have spilled onto the floor and contaminated the building and the men of B Crew. Finally, the lack of proper provisions mandated by item e. forced Phillip Piegari to leave containment to obtain provisions for the crew. “I don’t think they expected the hurricane to be of that magnitude, that it could do such damage. But they knew it was coming and didn’t prepare for it,” one crew member later reasoned.
The government broke Dr. Jerry Callis’ cardinal rule. “Each person,” Dr. Callis wrote in the introduction to his three-inch-thick island safety manual circulated to all new employees, “has a moral and legal responsibility for assuring that maximum biological safety precautions will be taken in all operations.” A reckless disregard of Callis’s edict and the standard emergency safety procedures caused Lab 257 to come apart at the seams during Hurricane Bob. Those responsible for Plum Island safety, notably island Director Dr. Roger Breeze, compromised the safety of both the island’s employees and the public at large. It is only by a stroke of good fortune that contamination didn’t noticeably spread to Long Island, Connecticut, and beyond.
The government refused to admit anything went wrong in Lab 257. Dr. Plowman’s letter of commendation didn’t acknowledge that a power outage actually occurred. Management treated B Crew’s thirty-two-hour dance with a hurricane like a typical day on Plum Island. Over time, the men found other employment or retired. A few continued to work on Plum Island for the private contractor, at a fraction of their previous wages, without any meaningful retirement benefits.
Soon after the hurricane, Phillip Piegari developed flu like symptoms— constant nausea, severe headaches, and hot-and-cold flashes. His family physician requested the blood sample that Plum Island officials took when he began employment. The government refused to release it. After a Newsday article uncovered the government’s stonewalling, officials gave in and released a portion of the blood sample. After batteries of tests, neither his doctor nor doctors from the State University Medical Center at Stony Brook were able to diagnose Phillip’s illness. Like all standard medical centers, the facility was not equipped to check his blood against exotic “animal viruses,” many of which can infect humans. One location, however, did have the ability to test for them: the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. They refused to help. Instead, the scientists insisted that Phillip was a disgruntled laid-off worker suffering from a typical Lyme disease infection. But his medical doctors flatly refused to diagnose Phillip’s condition as Lyme disease. The symptoms went undiagnosed and unabated for six years before they gradually subsided, though he continues to suffer occasional mysterious relapses where he contracts viral-like symptoms. Over a decade later, Phillip Piegari tries to lead a generally healthy, normal life. Nonetheless, he is certain that he was infected with an unknown virus from his contact with contaminated sewage and poisoned air in Lab 257 on that fateful night. And Plum Island’s determination to prevent an accurate diagnosis only furthers that likelihood.
There is reason to believe Phillip wasn’t the only one who contracted something that night.
Two years after he helped rescue Lab 257 from certain meltdown, Stanley “Shine” Mickaliger came down with relentless arthritic conditions. First he had a difficult time bending his elbow. Then his legs hurt him when he walked. And then he couldn’t walk at all. “For eighteen months, I was deadly sick—my wife would have to fit me into the car to go see the local doctor.” Shine’s country physician put him on a heavy regimen of cortisone steroid shots to bring down inflammation, which eased some of the pain, but replaced it with a dogged malaise and awful bruises from bumping into things around the house. Plum Island viewed Shine’s illness the same way they did Phillip’s and those of others—with denial and with contempt. Unlike Phillip, Shine couldn’t offer his doctors a baseline blood sample, since Plum Island never took one from him during his twenty-year career. When he asked a Plum Island safety officer for help in finding out the cause of his condition, the official told him there was no money in the budget to do it, and that they didn’t have the dime for it. “It’s hard to prove,” says Shine, “and I wasn’t bled by Plum Island, so who knows?” He couldn’t point to the Lab 257 meltdown as the definitive cause, however, because that fateful weekend wasn’t the first time he was exposed to contagion.
On Wednesday morning, March 2, 1983, a sewer line leaking from Animal Room 264, which had cattle infected with the Isfahan strain of vesicular stomatitis, spilled into the equipment room. Sludge splashed on Shine and two other building engineers taking their coffee break. Shine and another worker immediately placed plastic tape over the gushing pipe and flooded the floor area with hydrochloric acid.
Ten minutes after the crew’s panicked phone call, safety officers Drs. Walker and Richmond barged into the equipment room and ordered the area locked down and decontaminated. The crew locked the corridor door and sealed it with duct tape on both sides. Food was incinerated, and clothes were stripped and stuffed into the steam autoclave. The workers mopped the corridor floor with Vanodine disinfectant solution and then poured a full-strength gallon of One-Stroke into the drain in Room 264. An hour later, a safety tech, wearing heavy rubber gloves and a full-face respirator, removed the duct tape and drained the trap into a bucket. Engineers located a small hole in the pipe, and Shine patched it up with silicone. The room was deconned a third time and finally declared clean late in the afternoon. After ninety-six hours of close monitoring, miraculously neither Shine nor the ten others exposed to the contaminated waste came down with any disease. Following biosafety rules to the T, it required seven and a half hours for the engineering and safety department to control a tiny pinhole in a pipe during Jerry Callis’ administration, with far more efficiency and concern than the next regime would devote to a full biological meltdown.
After the meltdown, with no help from Plum Island and no diagnosis from his doctor, Shine turned to the one person who could help him recover—his wife, Fran. “My best doctor was my wife. She took all these books out of the local library, and threw away my meds.” Fran put him on a strict regimen of exercise, good food, and positive thinking, and he slowly regained himself. To this very day, he has no idea what his illness was. A possibility is one of one of the feared “slow” viruses, so named not for the tempo of virus growth, but for the protracted time of the disease’s course, which can be months or years.1
1 AIDS and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD, the human variant of mad cow disease) are examples a of slow virus and a slow acting prion disease.
The laymen tried to figure out what they had contracted on Plum
Island, and pleaded for answers from their North Fork doctors, family general practitioners better suited to bandaging knee scrapes and prescribing
antibiotics for ear infections. “You are exposed to so many viruses over
there,” says Shine from experience. “They say it won’t bother you, that the
germs aren’t zoonotic, that they won’t transfer to you. Then you become
ill, you tell your doctors you are ill, and that you work on Plum Island.
And look here—they have no tests for you. Hepatitis they have a test for—
but for Rift Valley fever? And USDA, their response to us always was,
‘Prove it to us. Show us what you caught here and how you caught it.’ Now
how the hell I am supposed to do that?”
In a newspaper article that appeared the day after B Crew was commended for its “quick and decisive action” and then summarily fired, Plum Island officials stated there was never any danger to laboratory staff or to the public during the hurricane. Manuel Barbeito, an island safety officer, told Newsday, “There is no potential problem here . . . this is a safe facility,” and stated that the laboratory air filters operated during the hurricane without power and prevented diseases from escaping. When Phillip, per his physician’s instructions, asked for a list of what he was exposed to during the storm, an official handed him a letter. “It said the only things we were exposed to were paint, paint thinner, and oil—that’s all.” Apprised of the hurricane incident by Plum Island employees and worried local residents, Congressman George Hochbrueckner wrote a letter to the Department of Agriculture, demanding information on the storm’s effects on the island’s laboratories.
Though the government told the public nothing had happened, steps were being taken on Plum Island that reflected a different belief. A few days after the Newsday story, a portable generator the size of a tractor-trailer appeared alongside Lab 257. With the underground cable still shorted out, the portable generator provided the emergency power the lab had lacked for months, and covered the momentary power breaks when both the overheads and underground cable were restored. Though management claimed the biological containment system had worked properly through the hurricane, technicians replaced all of Lab 257’s outside air dampers with new units. New procedures were adopted to regularly inspect the air dampers— which, according to the government, also worked properly when Hurricane Bob hit. Henceforth, after even a minor power interruption, employees said safety officers climbed atop Lab 257 to personally inspect the roof and ascertain that outside air dampers were closing properly. And just days before they were canned, B Crew was finally trained on how to use the face respirators. “They were afraid of lawsuits,” guesses Shine, “so they did this to have it on record that we were all trained.”
Today Shine and Fran spend their days working around the house, hustling firewood, and taking long walks along the beach, pointing out sea turtles and searching for washed-up fishing lures. Hurricane Bob, searing pain, and the recurring nightmares are now in the past. In his work cabin, out back behind his modest home, Shine keeps perhaps the world’s largest collection of jigs and lures. Thousands of multicolored and feathered wooden, shiny metal, and plastic lures adorn the walls and ceilings of the dark brown cabin, warmed up in the winter by a small space heater. When he’s not fishing with his two older brothers, Charlie and Eddie, aged eighty-six and eighty-one, he’s hunched over the workbench fashioning the lures from broken ones found strewn on the beach. Shine’s at his happiest hammering, sawing, gluing, and picking away at the rigs that will trick next season’s blues and stripers into thinking they have fixed their mouths onto something delicious to eat—only to realize it’ll be Shine, not the poor fish, doing all the eating.
Phillip still lives out on the east end, working for the county now, spending his free time on his beloved boat with his black Labrador, Jezebel. A few years ago, Zyta contracted breast cancer, underwent extensive chemotherapy, and thankfully pulled through. The cancer survivor now works as a translator and was recently honored at a police department banquet for lending her bilingual skills to help solve a murder case that had gone unsolved for years.
THE BREEZE SUBSIDES
Dr. Roger Breeze left Plum Island in 1995 for a better career opportunity. His two predecessors had been honored by the ferryboats M. S. Shahan and J. J. Callis. “They won’t need a boat to remember me by,” Breeze told a Newsday reporter who asked him about his legacy. He was even more direct with me when we spoke. “My memorial has to do with the people I got there. I’m not interested in any damn boats and buildings. Facilities and boats don’t do the research. People do. You can set out a stack of my scientific papers, and I’ll be judged by those. I come back to this—it’s the glory at all levels, and not in a negative kind of way.”
Roger Breeze drew responses out of people, whether they were his superiors, his scientists, or his support workers. A head Washington-based USDA official said, “Some people just think he’s the best—and some don’t.” From that distant official’s vantage point, Dr. Breeze was “innovative and dynamic.” He had reworked Plum Island’s entire scientific program, rebuilt the facility, and saved Plum Island from imminent demise.
Ed Hollreiser sees Breeze as a “strange guy, very cunning—he’d call me in for little chats and tell me things that he said he didn’t wanted repeated, but he really wanted me to spread the word.” Plum Island safety officer Tom Sawicki says, “Breeze was here for a reason, he did what he had to do, and a lot of people didn’t like it.” Fran Demorest says, “It was his steppingstone. And he made enemies there.”
Dr. Robert Shope, who had lived with Breeze for a time in Connecticut, takes a middle view. “He did some things that weren’t too popular with his superiors at USDA. And he may have gotten rid of some people at Plum who were deadwood, and in that sense, he wasn’t very popular. But I think he was part of the driving force of the island.” When asked to compare him to his predecessor, Shope thought of Breeze as “a totally different type of person—and still is. He’s a wheeler-dealer type, and Callis was very conservative and played by the book and that sort of thing. Just two different people.”
“My problem with Roger,” says Dr. Carol House, “is that he still has an influence. He still shows up at town meetings and stands in the back, hovering. He still has a large influence over there, and he has pulled potential [Plum Island director] candidates.”
“Roger’s very hard to talk about,” Dr. Jim House says, slowly, measuring his words. “Not one of the brighter moments in Plum Island history. Roger had a way of manipulating situations so he was always politically on top. No matter what he did, he would come out smelling like a rose. He was very, very clever.
“He did make strides, enhancing the amount of molecular virology done, but he even took that to an extreme. He was somewhat of a visionary, and he’s into biological warfare, his new thing now. But he didn’t have the vision or skills as a manager to run Plum in a smooth and productive manner. I didn’t have a lot of respect for him scientifically. He was selling genetically resistant animals, and we didn’t do genetics of animals. We had this genetically resistant cow, and transgenic pigs. Of course that never went anywhere.
“A lack of perspective—of all the things you’d say about him, that would be the one—a lack of perspective.”
"The two research groups at Plum Island are without question the best of their kind in the world,” boasts Dr. Breeze, “and that wasn’t true when I went there. If there’s one thing I do know about very, very well, it’s how to motivate scientists to go beyond what they think they can do—that’s what I do best.” But in some cases, the science on Plum Island may actually have been set back. Proof of that, says Dr. Richard Endris, is that some three years after the four scientists had been dismissed, one of Dr. Breeze’s new recruits reestablished and set up—from scratch and at great cost—the same African swine fever tick colony research that Breeze disbanded upon his arrival. As for the new laboratory facility, it included a new animal isolation wing, and a fancy sandstone two-story brick office complex slapped across the front of Lab 101. The brown brick and shiny glass façade conceals the deteriorating 1956 laboratory facility behind it.
Retired from government service, John Boyle still follows the career path of his old boss. “You saw what happened after Roger left Plum Island—he became an associate area director, he then became an area director. Now he is a big-time guy in Washington.” Dr. Breeze is the associate administrator for “special interagency programs” for Agricultural Research Service. With his boss, Floyd Horn, at the Department of Homeland Security, Breeze oversees a good part of the USDA’s scientific research. Undoubtedly, the steep trajectory of his career path in America trumps the sluggish thirty-two-step ladder he left behind at Glasgow University.
Is it possible that Dr. Breeze was blinded by his own ambition? “He is a very talented guy, and cares very deeply,” says Boyle. “I think he cares so much that maybe it even overrides his talent, because he is so tenacious, once he sets out to do something, it will get done. But he really cares about science—good science. It’s why he took a liking to me, because I worked so hard to get him the ferryboat.” Blinded by the glory of science, or blinded by unadulterated ambition—or perhaps both—Dr. Breeze’s curriculum vitae soared while the people of Plum Island tumbled and the island itself crumbled. In the wake of that unbridled progress, people’s lives changed, and not necessarily for the better. “If this place wasn’t going to be different,” Breeze told a reporter, reflecting on his tenure, “it was going to be gone.” For certain, Roger Breeze had made Plum Island different. “Living with success,” he says, “is harder than living with failure.”
next
The Homeland
13
The Aftermath
They won’t need a boat to remember me by.
—PLUM ISLAND DIRECTOR
ROGER G. BREEZE
Hurricane Bob’s devastating effects ranged far beyond Plum Island.
During its run up the East Coast, over seven inches of rain fell for
twelve hours straight. A total of eighteen people, from South Carolina
to Maine, perished in the storm, which left almost $2 billion in damage
in its wake. Like a sports team retires player numbers, the National
Hurricane Center retires hurricane names; when they cause enough
death and destruction their names are never repeated. The name “Bob”
was retired, and it went into the annals of history as the eighth costliest
Atlantic storm in United States history. Established when the facility began operations a half-century ago, the comprehensive Plum Island biological safety manual sets forth explicit “Emergency Hurricane Procedures.” Lying in perhaps the most vulnerable spot in the northeast hurricane corridor, Plum Island played host to violent fall weather as soon as the USDA arrived—and long before. Storms in the 1700s and 1800s wrecked numerous schooners on its rocks, whose victims’ bodies (often anonymous) were buried on the island; during the 1950s, said an old employee, every day after a rough storm hit, another person resigned from staff. A gale swept through the east end in November of 1953 as finishing touches were being put on Lab 257. Much like Bob, this storm struck Plum Island dead on with devastating force. Tidal waves rushed in from Gardiner’s Bay, wrecking one of the Army’s boats and flooding three feet deep against Lab 257’s four-foot concrete barrier, recently installed and dried. The T-boat was found the next day, dragged across the beach and broken to pieces. Channels connecting the marshy ponds with the bay were cut wide open from waves. Seawater flooded in, creating a brackish environment that not only threatened the freshwater wells, but could shear off twenty acres at Pine Point and erase the land buffer between Lab 257 and the ocean. Awaiting the inevitable destruction of the next nor’easter, the Army Corps of Engineers sandbagged the channels shut and filled the area with tons of jetty rocks. Though Lab 257 was saved, the close call should have called into question—before its doors opened—the decision to locate a germ lab on the island’s southwest shore. A Plum Island hurricane inundation table shows Lab 257 completely inundated with water during a CAT-3 hurricane’s twelve-foot surge elevations.
Knowing firsthand the potential for disaster, the scientists who founded the animal disease laboratory on Plum Island drew up the hurricane emergency plan:
The aftermath conditions of a severe storm or other natural caused disaster could severely limit or prevent the emergency operations of facilities.... Potential breaching of the agent contaminant aspects of [Plum Island] facilities and escape of disease agents could also occur in this type of emergency condition.
Upon issuance of a twenty-four-hour hurricane warning by the National Weather Service, procedures dictate securing laboratory buildings to protect against damage. This includes covering all windows with one-quarter inch plywood and sandbagging buildings to minimize water damage in low-lying areas. The emergency plan specifically mentions sandbagging Lab 257, but when Hurricane Bob was on its way, no one sandbagged 257 or the power plant. Because of this oversight, the power plant flooded. It was only through the ingenuity and hard work of men like Phillip Piegari that the generators were saved, averting the loss of power to the entire island and a far greater catastrophe.
In addition to securing the buildings, the emergency procedures mandated additional safety measures for approaching hurricanes:
a. Water tower must be filled to capacity;
b. All underground electrical feeders shall be utilized;
c. Stand-by generators must be operational and be attended by competent operators;
d. All sewage in Buildings #102 and #257 must be processed and tanks emptied; and
e. Employees must be advised to have food, water, prescription medicines, etc., within their respective work stations.
Management failed to follow these procedures after receiving the hurricane warning for Hurricane Bob. In fact, they didn’t follow a single one. Item a. simply did not occur. Items b. and c. were impossible, thanks to management’s disregard of safety when it failed to repair Lab 257’s underground power cable. If procedure d. had been followed, sewage would not have spilled onto the floor and contaminated the building and the men of B Crew. Finally, the lack of proper provisions mandated by item e. forced Phillip Piegari to leave containment to obtain provisions for the crew. “I don’t think they expected the hurricane to be of that magnitude, that it could do such damage. But they knew it was coming and didn’t prepare for it,” one crew member later reasoned.
The government broke Dr. Jerry Callis’ cardinal rule. “Each person,” Dr. Callis wrote in the introduction to his three-inch-thick island safety manual circulated to all new employees, “has a moral and legal responsibility for assuring that maximum biological safety precautions will be taken in all operations.” A reckless disregard of Callis’s edict and the standard emergency safety procedures caused Lab 257 to come apart at the seams during Hurricane Bob. Those responsible for Plum Island safety, notably island Director Dr. Roger Breeze, compromised the safety of both the island’s employees and the public at large. It is only by a stroke of good fortune that contamination didn’t noticeably spread to Long Island, Connecticut, and beyond.
The government refused to admit anything went wrong in Lab 257. Dr. Plowman’s letter of commendation didn’t acknowledge that a power outage actually occurred. Management treated B Crew’s thirty-two-hour dance with a hurricane like a typical day on Plum Island. Over time, the men found other employment or retired. A few continued to work on Plum Island for the private contractor, at a fraction of their previous wages, without any meaningful retirement benefits.
Soon after the hurricane, Phillip Piegari developed flu like symptoms— constant nausea, severe headaches, and hot-and-cold flashes. His family physician requested the blood sample that Plum Island officials took when he began employment. The government refused to release it. After a Newsday article uncovered the government’s stonewalling, officials gave in and released a portion of the blood sample. After batteries of tests, neither his doctor nor doctors from the State University Medical Center at Stony Brook were able to diagnose Phillip’s illness. Like all standard medical centers, the facility was not equipped to check his blood against exotic “animal viruses,” many of which can infect humans. One location, however, did have the ability to test for them: the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. They refused to help. Instead, the scientists insisted that Phillip was a disgruntled laid-off worker suffering from a typical Lyme disease infection. But his medical doctors flatly refused to diagnose Phillip’s condition as Lyme disease. The symptoms went undiagnosed and unabated for six years before they gradually subsided, though he continues to suffer occasional mysterious relapses where he contracts viral-like symptoms. Over a decade later, Phillip Piegari tries to lead a generally healthy, normal life. Nonetheless, he is certain that he was infected with an unknown virus from his contact with contaminated sewage and poisoned air in Lab 257 on that fateful night. And Plum Island’s determination to prevent an accurate diagnosis only furthers that likelihood.
There is reason to believe Phillip wasn’t the only one who contracted something that night.
Two years after he helped rescue Lab 257 from certain meltdown, Stanley “Shine” Mickaliger came down with relentless arthritic conditions. First he had a difficult time bending his elbow. Then his legs hurt him when he walked. And then he couldn’t walk at all. “For eighteen months, I was deadly sick—my wife would have to fit me into the car to go see the local doctor.” Shine’s country physician put him on a heavy regimen of cortisone steroid shots to bring down inflammation, which eased some of the pain, but replaced it with a dogged malaise and awful bruises from bumping into things around the house. Plum Island viewed Shine’s illness the same way they did Phillip’s and those of others—with denial and with contempt. Unlike Phillip, Shine couldn’t offer his doctors a baseline blood sample, since Plum Island never took one from him during his twenty-year career. When he asked a Plum Island safety officer for help in finding out the cause of his condition, the official told him there was no money in the budget to do it, and that they didn’t have the dime for it. “It’s hard to prove,” says Shine, “and I wasn’t bled by Plum Island, so who knows?” He couldn’t point to the Lab 257 meltdown as the definitive cause, however, because that fateful weekend wasn’t the first time he was exposed to contagion.
On Wednesday morning, March 2, 1983, a sewer line leaking from Animal Room 264, which had cattle infected with the Isfahan strain of vesicular stomatitis, spilled into the equipment room. Sludge splashed on Shine and two other building engineers taking their coffee break. Shine and another worker immediately placed plastic tape over the gushing pipe and flooded the floor area with hydrochloric acid.
Ten minutes after the crew’s panicked phone call, safety officers Drs. Walker and Richmond barged into the equipment room and ordered the area locked down and decontaminated. The crew locked the corridor door and sealed it with duct tape on both sides. Food was incinerated, and clothes were stripped and stuffed into the steam autoclave. The workers mopped the corridor floor with Vanodine disinfectant solution and then poured a full-strength gallon of One-Stroke into the drain in Room 264. An hour later, a safety tech, wearing heavy rubber gloves and a full-face respirator, removed the duct tape and drained the trap into a bucket. Engineers located a small hole in the pipe, and Shine patched it up with silicone. The room was deconned a third time and finally declared clean late in the afternoon. After ninety-six hours of close monitoring, miraculously neither Shine nor the ten others exposed to the contaminated waste came down with any disease. Following biosafety rules to the T, it required seven and a half hours for the engineering and safety department to control a tiny pinhole in a pipe during Jerry Callis’ administration, with far more efficiency and concern than the next regime would devote to a full biological meltdown.
After the meltdown, with no help from Plum Island and no diagnosis from his doctor, Shine turned to the one person who could help him recover—his wife, Fran. “My best doctor was my wife. She took all these books out of the local library, and threw away my meds.” Fran put him on a strict regimen of exercise, good food, and positive thinking, and he slowly regained himself. To this very day, he has no idea what his illness was. A possibility is one of one of the feared “slow” viruses, so named not for the tempo of virus growth, but for the protracted time of the disease’s course, which can be months or years.1
1 AIDS and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD, the human variant of mad cow disease) are examples a of slow virus and a slow acting prion disease.
In a newspaper article that appeared the day after B Crew was commended for its “quick and decisive action” and then summarily fired, Plum Island officials stated there was never any danger to laboratory staff or to the public during the hurricane. Manuel Barbeito, an island safety officer, told Newsday, “There is no potential problem here . . . this is a safe facility,” and stated that the laboratory air filters operated during the hurricane without power and prevented diseases from escaping. When Phillip, per his physician’s instructions, asked for a list of what he was exposed to during the storm, an official handed him a letter. “It said the only things we were exposed to were paint, paint thinner, and oil—that’s all.” Apprised of the hurricane incident by Plum Island employees and worried local residents, Congressman George Hochbrueckner wrote a letter to the Department of Agriculture, demanding information on the storm’s effects on the island’s laboratories.
Though the government told the public nothing had happened, steps were being taken on Plum Island that reflected a different belief. A few days after the Newsday story, a portable generator the size of a tractor-trailer appeared alongside Lab 257. With the underground cable still shorted out, the portable generator provided the emergency power the lab had lacked for months, and covered the momentary power breaks when both the overheads and underground cable were restored. Though management claimed the biological containment system had worked properly through the hurricane, technicians replaced all of Lab 257’s outside air dampers with new units. New procedures were adopted to regularly inspect the air dampers— which, according to the government, also worked properly when Hurricane Bob hit. Henceforth, after even a minor power interruption, employees said safety officers climbed atop Lab 257 to personally inspect the roof and ascertain that outside air dampers were closing properly. And just days before they were canned, B Crew was finally trained on how to use the face respirators. “They were afraid of lawsuits,” guesses Shine, “so they did this to have it on record that we were all trained.”
Today Shine and Fran spend their days working around the house, hustling firewood, and taking long walks along the beach, pointing out sea turtles and searching for washed-up fishing lures. Hurricane Bob, searing pain, and the recurring nightmares are now in the past. In his work cabin, out back behind his modest home, Shine keeps perhaps the world’s largest collection of jigs and lures. Thousands of multicolored and feathered wooden, shiny metal, and plastic lures adorn the walls and ceilings of the dark brown cabin, warmed up in the winter by a small space heater. When he’s not fishing with his two older brothers, Charlie and Eddie, aged eighty-six and eighty-one, he’s hunched over the workbench fashioning the lures from broken ones found strewn on the beach. Shine’s at his happiest hammering, sawing, gluing, and picking away at the rigs that will trick next season’s blues and stripers into thinking they have fixed their mouths onto something delicious to eat—only to realize it’ll be Shine, not the poor fish, doing all the eating.
Phillip still lives out on the east end, working for the county now, spending his free time on his beloved boat with his black Labrador, Jezebel. A few years ago, Zyta contracted breast cancer, underwent extensive chemotherapy, and thankfully pulled through. The cancer survivor now works as a translator and was recently honored at a police department banquet for lending her bilingual skills to help solve a murder case that had gone unsolved for years.
THE BREEZE SUBSIDES
Dr. Roger Breeze left Plum Island in 1995 for a better career opportunity. His two predecessors had been honored by the ferryboats M. S. Shahan and J. J. Callis. “They won’t need a boat to remember me by,” Breeze told a Newsday reporter who asked him about his legacy. He was even more direct with me when we spoke. “My memorial has to do with the people I got there. I’m not interested in any damn boats and buildings. Facilities and boats don’t do the research. People do. You can set out a stack of my scientific papers, and I’ll be judged by those. I come back to this—it’s the glory at all levels, and not in a negative kind of way.”
Roger Breeze drew responses out of people, whether they were his superiors, his scientists, or his support workers. A head Washington-based USDA official said, “Some people just think he’s the best—and some don’t.” From that distant official’s vantage point, Dr. Breeze was “innovative and dynamic.” He had reworked Plum Island’s entire scientific program, rebuilt the facility, and saved Plum Island from imminent demise.
Ed Hollreiser sees Breeze as a “strange guy, very cunning—he’d call me in for little chats and tell me things that he said he didn’t wanted repeated, but he really wanted me to spread the word.” Plum Island safety officer Tom Sawicki says, “Breeze was here for a reason, he did what he had to do, and a lot of people didn’t like it.” Fran Demorest says, “It was his steppingstone. And he made enemies there.”
Dr. Robert Shope, who had lived with Breeze for a time in Connecticut, takes a middle view. “He did some things that weren’t too popular with his superiors at USDA. And he may have gotten rid of some people at Plum who were deadwood, and in that sense, he wasn’t very popular. But I think he was part of the driving force of the island.” When asked to compare him to his predecessor, Shope thought of Breeze as “a totally different type of person—and still is. He’s a wheeler-dealer type, and Callis was very conservative and played by the book and that sort of thing. Just two different people.”
“My problem with Roger,” says Dr. Carol House, “is that he still has an influence. He still shows up at town meetings and stands in the back, hovering. He still has a large influence over there, and he has pulled potential [Plum Island director] candidates.”
“Roger’s very hard to talk about,” Dr. Jim House says, slowly, measuring his words. “Not one of the brighter moments in Plum Island history. Roger had a way of manipulating situations so he was always politically on top. No matter what he did, he would come out smelling like a rose. He was very, very clever.
“He did make strides, enhancing the amount of molecular virology done, but he even took that to an extreme. He was somewhat of a visionary, and he’s into biological warfare, his new thing now. But he didn’t have the vision or skills as a manager to run Plum in a smooth and productive manner. I didn’t have a lot of respect for him scientifically. He was selling genetically resistant animals, and we didn’t do genetics of animals. We had this genetically resistant cow, and transgenic pigs. Of course that never went anywhere.
“A lack of perspective—of all the things you’d say about him, that would be the one—a lack of perspective.”
"The two research groups at Plum Island are without question the best of their kind in the world,” boasts Dr. Breeze, “and that wasn’t true when I went there. If there’s one thing I do know about very, very well, it’s how to motivate scientists to go beyond what they think they can do—that’s what I do best.” But in some cases, the science on Plum Island may actually have been set back. Proof of that, says Dr. Richard Endris, is that some three years after the four scientists had been dismissed, one of Dr. Breeze’s new recruits reestablished and set up—from scratch and at great cost—the same African swine fever tick colony research that Breeze disbanded upon his arrival. As for the new laboratory facility, it included a new animal isolation wing, and a fancy sandstone two-story brick office complex slapped across the front of Lab 101. The brown brick and shiny glass façade conceals the deteriorating 1956 laboratory facility behind it.
Retired from government service, John Boyle still follows the career path of his old boss. “You saw what happened after Roger left Plum Island—he became an associate area director, he then became an area director. Now he is a big-time guy in Washington.” Dr. Breeze is the associate administrator for “special interagency programs” for Agricultural Research Service. With his boss, Floyd Horn, at the Department of Homeland Security, Breeze oversees a good part of the USDA’s scientific research. Undoubtedly, the steep trajectory of his career path in America trumps the sluggish thirty-two-step ladder he left behind at Glasgow University.
Is it possible that Dr. Breeze was blinded by his own ambition? “He is a very talented guy, and cares very deeply,” says Boyle. “I think he cares so much that maybe it even overrides his talent, because he is so tenacious, once he sets out to do something, it will get done. But he really cares about science—good science. It’s why he took a liking to me, because I worked so hard to get him the ferryboat.” Blinded by the glory of science, or blinded by unadulterated ambition—or perhaps both—Dr. Breeze’s curriculum vitae soared while the people of Plum Island tumbled and the island itself crumbled. In the wake of that unbridled progress, people’s lives changed, and not necessarily for the better. “If this place wasn’t going to be different,” Breeze told a reporter, reflecting on his tenure, “it was going to be gone.” For certain, Roger Breeze had made Plum Island different. “Living with success,” he says, “is harder than living with failure.”
next
The Homeland
No comments:
Post a Comment