Amerithrax (51 page)
Late Thursday afternoon, July 25, the U.S. Postal Service conducted a last-minute press conference to detail its test to pump chlorine dioxide gas into Brentwood. Chlorine diox- ide, with its familiar chlorine swimming pool smell, was the only proven technology available for truly eliminating an- thrax from such a gigantic structure. They knew the gas would work. The same lethal letter that had infected the Hart Building had corrupted Brentwood, and since the gas had been effective against those spores, the strain was not chlo- rine dioxide–resistant.
The interior of the Brentwood plant was spookily empty. No postal employee had worked in the building since its closure on the day Thomas Morris died soon after calling for help on the phone. Mail had been repackaged and re- moved for irradiation. Rolling stock, mail trays and bins, even vending machines had been carted away for sanitiza- tion. Mail-processing equipment had been wiped down with a solution of chlorine bleach. Even trash was decontami- nated. But sterilize as they did, spores still floated invisibly and lazily above in the dazzling lights. Sometimes they set- tled atop three gigantic letter-sorting machines. One of the three, No. 17, had sorted the anthrax-tainted letters Ameri- thrax had posted to members of Congress. To be doubly certain of eradicating the spores, the crew had erected a 29,000-cubic-foot tent over all three monster machines. The tent created a fumigating plant within a fumigating plant.
On Friday, at 10:00 a.m. sharp, the House Government Reform subcommittee convened a public hearing to debate the following week’s fumigation test. One hundred and forty interested spectators showed up at Gallaudet University’s Kellogg Conference. Many were postal workers reluctant to return to the infected mail facility. Christine Armstrong, a twenty-nine-year Brentwood veteran, said she would not re- turn when the plant reopened no matter what precautions were instituted. “Who would want to go back in there?” said Armstrong, who had been transferred to a Capitol Heights postal plant the previous fall. “We have been treated unfairly from the get-go, and they have no idea what we’re going through.”
“The amount of chemicals in play is very limited,” re- assured Peter LaPorte, director of emergency management for the District, “but this will serve as a very good test run for us.” Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), representing the subcommittee, urged them to take extra care. “We must take no chances at Brentwood,” she said. “The Brentwood trag- edy reminded us just how thin our knowledge of anthrax was...I say do it slow but just do it right.”
Norton asked Thomas G. Day, vice president of engi- neering for the Postal Service, to guarantee the Postal Ser- vice would reimburse the city for expenses related to the decontamination and asked representatives from the federal CDC to undertake an epidemiological health study of Brent- wood workers and the community surrounding the poisoned plant. Postal and public health agency officials believed the Brentwood postal plant could be safely reopened several months after that summer’s planned decontamination. One of the renovations would be a system to detect biological agents.
Over the weekend, the Department of Mental Health sent twenty workers door-to-door in the neighborhoods surround- ing the Brentwood plant—T Street, 9th Street, V Street NE, Reed and Douglas Streets, Adams Street, Edgewood Ter- race, and Rhode Island Avenue, among others. Their job was to inform residents of the forthcoming test. The Postal Service set up a toll-free information line to answer ques- tions about Brentwood twenty-four hours a day. Guidelines developed by the National Response Team (NRT) were put in place.
On Sunday evening, D.C. police filled out a 282-yard
On Monday, July 29, the day of the preliminary test was, as hoped, a sunny day. Hot sun on any leaking chlorine dioxide would provide a natural safety net, neutralizing es- caping gas instantly. (Though it takes longer, any gas leaks at night would still break down.) For more than seventy years, chlorine dioxide had been safely disinfecting the na- tion’s water at nine hundred water treatment facilities. Na- tionwide, it was commonly used in sewage treatment systems and pulp making. “It is a chemical we understand well,” Gilbert Gordon, professor of chemistry at Miami Uni- versity in Ohio, said. “We know how to make it. We know how to destroy it.”
Emergency management officials had carefully laid out the safest route for transporting the chemicals. On this day, only five pounds of the yellow-green chlorine dioxide would be used. Such a small amount wouldn’t pose a health threat should it escape. Negative air pressure would keep the gas inside the building. While it was not a gas that would ex- plode, at least not in the concentration being delivered, it was still too unstable to transport as a gas by truck. Instead a “precursor substance” was driven to the Brentwood park- ing lot in tanker trucks. Four chemicals—sodium, hypochlo- rite, hydrochloric acid, and sodium chlorite would be mixed at the site as needed.
A huge machine converted the chemicals to chlorine di- oxide gas. The concentration would be kept far below vol- atile levels to reduce risk of fire. Pumping was slated to start at 9:00 a.m. But there was a delay while engineers operated remotely through the “dormant” heating system to keep a constant eighty degrees inside.
Using monitors, the engineers continuously adjusted hu- midity, temperature, and gas concentration. Officials had great faith that the equipment would allow them to maintain the proper relative humidity (a precise level of 75 percent
Temperatures can vary, but humidity must not. That fact had been confirmed at the Hart Office Building. Humidity inside Brentwood now averaged almost 30 percent and would be raised by humidifiers as the time to inject the gas was reached. Around 10:45 a.m. the countdown began. Would the fumigation equipment be up to the task of de- contaminating Brentwood and could they keep the spores and gas contained? Technicians called a halt. It would take them a little longer to get the temperature and humidity to the perfect points where the gas would be most effective.
Finally, at 12:18 p.m., the countdown began again.
At 12:20 p.m. gas began its work at a constant tempera- ture and humidity level. The process would be repeated five times.
Chlorine dioxide gas began roaring into the deserted mail center. Funneled through a three-foot-wide main distribution pipe, it raced on to fourteen specially built “emitters” at key locations inside Brentwood. The gas, swirling to the build- ing’s center, twisted and curled into every nook. The tent that had been erected over the three mail-processing ma- chines, including the one that had handled the anthrax letter that killed Morris and Curseen, concentrated the gas. The gas enveloped the three letter-sorters inside the tent, search- ing out spores with a vengeance. To expose all moving ma- chine parts to gas, they started up the sorting machines electronically. The din could not be heard outside where men waited expectantly.
Gas hissed through a secondary pipe, three branching pleated metallic tubes side by side, which in turn branched upward from the main pipe into the sixteen “dormant” roof- top heating and air-conditioning systems. It flowed through their vents into the building. High-speed fans, revved up by remote control, forced gas penetration to all areas. Chlorine dioxide saturated and penetrated the tough shells of the spores, which the humidity had softened. The warmth as- sisted the gas interaction with protein and DNA inside and
killed the spores more efficiently than any human cleaning ever could.
Outside, Hazmat crews continually updated temperature and barometric pressure in the area. They studied data on wind currents and direction to estimate how any escaping gas might move. The FDA analyzed air outside the plant for traces of leakage. Ambient air monitoring provided detailed information regarding the concentrations of chemicals and contaminants inside and outside. So far everything was go- ing as planned. It was hard to believe a little envelope that had touched another little envelope had caused all this.
A TAGA bus (an EPA van) circled the area monoto- nously, while the CDC took random air samples and ana- lyzed them. The technicians squinted, even sniffed, trying to detect the slightest trace of chlorine dioxide. Electronic air-monitoring locations were set to automatically halt the test if concentrations up to twenty-five parts per billion sus- tained for fifteen seconds were detected outside the building. Marcos Aquino, an EPA scene coordinator, told the press that the agency’s air quality was calibrated to detect chlorine dioxide outside the building at levels as low as thirteen parts.
This was two thousand times less than the levels that would have halted the operation.
People exposed to chlorine dioxide for eight hours at concentrations of one hundred parts per billion could ex- perience, at worst, difficulty breathing, runny noses, rashes, and watery eyes. There should be no further ill effects. Air- quality monitors beyond the yellow tape surrounding the plant on Brentwood Road NE continued clicking. They had picked up no trace of leakage so far.
When the gassing was done nine hundred spore strips placed around the area (three thousand had been suggested earlier) would be removed and tested to see if the fumigation had worked. After the test decontamination the gas would be neutralized and removed.
Only harmless by-products should remain by then—nat- ural substances such as water, salt water, and oxygen. They would be sealed in tanks and disposed of in accordance with EPA standards. This day’s results would determine whether the Postal Service’s fumigation equipment had been able to
Theodore Gordon, senior deputy director of the D.C. Health Department, saw that everything was working per- fectly. None of the chemical was found to have leaked. “We were just double-checking, making sure everything was in place and secure.” After twelve hours the gas would be sucked out through scrubbers to render it harmless. Then the test strips throughout, on walls, ceilings, and floors, would be checked to see if any spores remained. Prior to final cleaning, sometime in the future, the building itself would be cleansed of all residual chlorine dioxide gas using a chemical scrubber to neutralize the remaining gas. Large- volume exhaust fans, air filters, and sensor equipment would also be employed. Once the interior was cleaned of gas, a secondary cleaning would be done. Ceilings, joists, and car- peting and any suspect areas would be vacuumed using HEPA vacuums to remove any dust.
Dust, collected and sealed in containers, would be dis- posed of. It would take several weeks to analyze the strips and full-scale tests would begin in late August. At that time they would place six thousand new sample strips. Another three thousand HEPA, swab wipe, and air samples had to be taken the next day.
The CDC would try to culture anthrax spores from these samples. If limited contamination was found, the contractors would go back in and surface-clean the specific spots with a wet bleach solution on all hard surfaces. If the site was not clean, they would retest until the samples showed it was. Samples from the equipment in the tent would be col- lected about a week to ten days after the gassing. A detailed analysis would take an additional twenty to thirty days. If the first cleanup was a success, they would fumigate the entire building with two thousand pounds of chlorine gas created on the site by mixing about twenty thousand tons of
component materials.
After chlorine dioxide gas was pumped into Brentwood during the last stage, probably in December, workers in bio- hazard suits would reenter the building and collect more than eight thousand test strips impregnated with spores of a
In December, Brentwood would be renamed in honor of Morris and Curseen.
The cost of anthrax cleanup was estimated at $22 million, but factoring in the decontamination of New Jersey’s Ham- ilton facility still to come, the total would stand closer to
$35 million or even in excess of $100 million for all the facilities. After final decontamination Brentwood could be open by April 2003. Brentwood was coming back.