Examining New York's Bioresearch Laboratory

Evangelion quotes from a NY Press story about Plum Island: "'Located just two miles off the tip of Long Island and six miles from the Connecticut coastline, Plum Island is home to a Bio-Safety Level 4 (BSL-4) research facility... During the fifth month of [an Engineer's] strike, a three-hour power outage renewed public interest in the island... Without power, the air filtration systems are inoperable. Without power, decontamination procedures break down. Without power, the seals in the pressurized airlock doors start to deflate. According to one report, workers were desperately sealing the doors with duct tape...'"

Comments

BSL-4 labs

[BWJones]

Ahhhh, long walk on the beach of Plum Island watching the birds. (all kidding aside, seriously, it is good bird watching there). But, it should be noted that Plum Island is only one of several BSL-4 labs around the country that are publicly acknowledged. Others are located at UC Davis (proposed back in 2000 at least), UTMB in Galviston Texas, One propsed for Boston University, there are two just outside Washington D.C., there is one in Atlanta at the CDC and one in San Antonio. I believe we also have a BSL-4 lab out at dugway proving grounds in Utah as well.

So, one should know that these facilities are the absolute best place to do research with the kinds of pathogens and chemicals and folks should not be scared at the mere presence of these facilities because of the work they do to help understand disease and potentially, biological weapons that may be used against us. However, we should know about their presence, and we should have contingency plans in place for the surrounding population (aside from "sanitation") should we have problems at these facilities.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[DjMd]

You forgot Fort Detrick Right between Washington D.C. and Baltimore.
USAMRIID has over 10,000 square feet of Biosafety Level 4 (BL4) and 50,000 square feet of Biosafety Level 3 (BL3)....

Re:BSL-4 labs

[aschneid]

The proposal for the one at UC Davis was dropped due to public opinion. Although the federal government is still looking at building a new one. There were several proposed sites, and that list was narrowed down and UC Davis dropped from that list.

Part of the site determination that the government is doing for this new one is the surrounding area public opinion of the lab. UC Davis and the surrounding Sacramento and bay area had a very negative reaction to a BSL-4 lab being created. Therefore the government determined that it would not be a good idea to build it here.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Anonymous Coward]

My father is managing the construction of a new BSL-4 lab in Iowa. The test procedure involves compressing the room to some ridiculous pressure and then making sure it holds it for 48 hours or so. That means every outlet, every electrical conduit, every pipe, etc. must be epoxy sealed. Apparently the CDC had a BSL-4 building that never passed the pressure tests. So all that money later and it just sits empty.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Anonymous Coward]

...and a facility on the campus of Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) in Hamilton, Montana.

Quoted from Cryptome:

The Federal Government has approved 66.5 million dollars to fund a proposed expansion of the existing Rocky Mountain Laboratory for biodefense and emerging infectious diseases research. The proposed expansion includes a new suite of laboratories designed and constructed to the maximum biosafety level, Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4).

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Anonymous Coward]

There's one in Galveston? I'm pretty surprised they'd put one right in the path of so many hurricanes. I'm sure they've taken the necessary precautions, but it does seem like a bit more disaster-prone location than other areas of the country. I mean, why bear the added expense of hurricane proofing critical systems when you could just build it further inland? Sure, there are other disasters that could break the seals on these places all over the country, but Galveston just seems like a strange place for it considering its history.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[demachina]

There are probably a wonderful thing when they are used to prevent epidemics and to develop countermeasures for biological attacks. Unfortunately there is always the chance that they are dual use, especially at places like Ft. Dietrick. If they are also being used to reengineer microorganisms to be more effective weapons then they aren't quite as noble as you paint them. The U.S. would like you to believe they stopped developement of bioweapons in 1969 but you would have to be an optimist to believe that is really the case since the U.S. consistently opposes any international effort to verify bioweapons labs are not being used for new weapons research.

Probably the most disturbing indictment of these facilities is that the Anthrax used in the attacks in the U.S. that followed 9/11 were traced back to the Ames strain of Anthrax which is American in origin and is used extensively at
USAMRID, Dugway, and Batelle among others. A full list is here:

http://www.fas.org/bwc/news/anthraxreport.htm

The Anthrax attacks which have largely faded in to obscurity, unsolved, should be a source of deep concern to American's and the world. They might have been perpetrated by a roque wacko that had access to Anthrax in one of these facilities. Its pretty unlikely they were perpetrated by an Arab terrorist. They could have just as easily been a covert operation perpetrated by a misguided government agency designed to stoke fear of WMD's in the U.S. Coincidentally the Bush administration, right after this used the threat of WMD's as the rationale to attack Iraq though no significant WMD programs have been found there. They will, no doubt, continue to use WMD's as a rationale for preemptive warfare assuming they can get away with it after the bold faced lie the war in Iraq has proven to be.

WMD's are the perfect rationale for preemptive warfare. You can accuse any country of developing them and its impossible for the target country to prove they don't. Every nation in the world has dual use industrial equipment that can be redirected to chemical and biological weapons production and the Bush administration cynically uses this fact to suggest a target country is a danger because they have tanks thats could be used to ferment biological weapons, for example.

As much as the U.S. likes to get on the high horse about WMD's its still a fact that the U.S. has more of them than anyone and has used them in the past to kill large numbers of innocent civilians by nuking two cities in Japan full of civilians in particular.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Anonymous Coward]

while the article only gives it a passing metion, the reason people here in NYC (and especially where I grew up in CT) are freaked out about Plum Island is the emergence of a pair of exotic diseases in Connecticut in the last few decades (Lyme syndome and West Nile virus) that are both insect-borne and not (so far as anyone knows) indigenous to the area. Both also fall under the rubric of animal diseases, meaning the sort of things they work on at Plum Island.

While for all anyone knows Plum never touched these maladies, what happens there is a pretty big secret. Thte father of a childhood friend of mine worked at Plum, and would simply tell people he was a "veterinarian" who worked "near Long Island." I have no doubt taht BSL-4 labs are indeed the best place to do such research, if you can justify such research at all, but Plum Island's secrecy, coupled with the unexplained diseases in CT, the knowledge that the government plays with weaponizing germs that could kill literally everyone, and the tales of the heroics of Duct tape is far, far more then enough to want some hardcore and well-documented oversight of Plum Island.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Speare]

I just watched the movie Outbreak again; Dustin Hoffman's character is from USAMRIID. Besides some really sappy histrionics, it's a decent flick.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[demachina]

Let's see, further inland from Galveston, lets trade the threat of a hurricane for the threat of a class 5 tornado. hurricane ... tornado... hurricane ... tornado. OK lets move it to California. hurricane ... earthquake ... hurricane.

These facilities are never going to be 100% safe.

A few weeks ago a researcher accidentally exposed herself to Ebola. How did they respond. Sent her home and told her to come back if symptoms developed.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[AbbyNormal]

I agree we need these facilities, but why do they need to be so close to major populations? That's kinda the point of the article.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[itsnotthenetwork]

Tell the civilians in Nanking just how innocent the Japanese were, I'm sure they would love to hear that.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[datababe72]

I have no personal knowledge of the research done at Plum Island. However, they do have a website.
Not that you are likely to believe what they say about themselves. I suspect the father of your childhood friend just got tired of explaining what he did to freaked out people like you, and don't really consider that anecdote evidence of some big coverup of the research that goes on there.

There is also no point in arguing over whether or not the US is still involved in bioweapons research. None of us knows for certain... and those that do, can't say, or aren't believed (when they say that there is no research aimed at developing bioweapons going on).

However, I don't think the two diseases you mention are likely targets for such research, if it is continuing. Nor is "escaped from a bioweapons research lab" the most likely explanation for the arrival of these diseases.

The disease that we call Lyme disease has been around in Europe for quite awhile. Here is a short history. You are correct that no one really knows when it showed up here, but given the tick-infested state of many of the early immigrants to America, I don't think we really need to invoke some governmental conspiracy theory to explain it. As many of the patient testimonials show, this is a difficult disease to diagnose, and I don't find it hard to believe that it existing for a hundred years or so in the US before anyone really noticed it. Furthermore, I don't think Lyme disease would be a likely target for bioweapon research. It requires a tick bite to transmit, and not even a bite by an infected tick is guaranteed to transmit the illness. And the disease doesn't quickly disable the infected person. So: flakely transmission and unreliable effects. Not the best characteristics for a weapon.

Last I heard, the theory for how West Nile came here was via airplane: either a mosquito or two hitched a ride, or a person on board was infected. Since many infected people never really think they have anything worse than the flu, this is not unreasonable.

West nile is also not the big scary disease it is often made out to be, and again strikes me as an unlikely target for bioweapons research. According to the cdc:

"From 1999 through 2001, there were 149 cases of West Nile virus human illness in the United States reported to CDC and confirmed, including 18 deaths. "

Compare that to these numbers for deaths from the flu: somewhere in the 20,000 to 30,000 range EVERY YEAR.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[TGK]

My understanding was that the virus in question was the BSL4 agent Ebola Reston, which first appeared in the monkey houses in Reston VA.

The agent manifests flu like symptoms in the worst human cases. Generaly doing nothing at all in most cases.

I belive they also put her in quarentine for 24 hours while the ran the blood work to make certain it was Reston.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Cloud 9]

Would you rather it was operational?

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Skye16]

Okay, so we're going to tell civilians in Nanking that the civilians in Nagasaki and Hiroshima were innocent. All that proves is that mankind remains bound to misplaced hatreds no matter the facts.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm aware of tornados, but you know what? I've lived in west Texas all my life and I've never actually seen one, although they have indeed cut swaths of destruction through nearby towns before. I'm not suggesting there's anyplace 100% safe, nor am I suggesting the facility in Galveston is inherently unsafe. I am, however, surprised that I've never heard of it, especially because I would expect a lot of protests over such a facility being built anywhere, let alone in the hurricane capital of the Texas coast. I suppose that could've happened before my time, but I don't even know where to start looking for information about it. Maybe after work tonight I'll try a Google expedition.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe in any of these conspiracy theories for one very simple reason: The government is far too inept to successfully cover up all these conspiracies that people try to pin on it. I should know. I voted.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Flavius Stilicho]

As much as the U.S. likes to get on the high horse about WMD's its still a fact that the U.S. has more of them than anyone and has used them in the past to kill large numbers of innocent civilians by nuking two cities in Japan full of civilians in particular.

Ah, you sound European. I find it amazingly ironic how most Europeans and Asians today harp upon the US for it use of atomic weapons 50 years ago. The very fact that Europeans and Asians in general can discuss the topic openly and freely is directly atttributable to the US saving their collective asses (twice, in the case of Europe). Germany and Japan we rebuilt by the US after WWII. Add to that the huge amount of aid money the US sends overseas every year. Keep that in mind when slamming the US.

That said, most of us here in the US would agree with almost everything else that you put forth.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know Batelle had BSL-4 facilities. I better tape up my windows.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[canajin56]

Yes, and they are almost certain that this Anthrax came from Ft. Detrick, since that exact strain was used there, and some was missing. Additionally, one Lt. Col. Philip Zack was spotted by security cameras entering the facility after hours, and after he had been FIRED one year earlier for racially-motivated harassment against an Egyptian researched named Dr. Assaad. One day before the Anthrax attacks, the FBI was sent an anonymous letter warning that Dr. Assaad was a nutcase, and planning some sort of biological attack on the USA. They investigated him, but determined it was an attempt to frame him. But they NEVER investigated WHO was trying to frame him. Odds are it was the same person who initiated the attacks. (How else would he know?)

So what we have is somebody who was FIRED over his hatred of an Arab, who was spotted illegally entering a secure facility shortly before the Anthrax used in the attacks WENT MISSING, and they received a letter implicating this same Arab immediatly before the attacks began. Additionally, the letters sent with the anthrax were written so as to frame Arabs. However, forensic analysis revealed that the person who penned them writes in English, and was faking an Arabic "accent" on the penmanship (Or whatever it is called when your penmanship is affected by the script you first learned to write in) Also, the letters told the people to take antibiotics. Why would terrorists trying to kill somebody do all they can to help save them? A real terrorist wouldn't say it was Anthrax at all, let alone recommend a treatment. Some have said "Well penacillin wouldn't help, you need Cipero!" That is completely untrue. The people who make Cipero would like you to believe it is the only antibiotic that works, but it is not. There are many antibiotics that are effective. Penicillin is, and is FAR cheaper.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[hardaker]

[I'm in Davis]

Well, the campus is still trying to put one in and get a future site here. The public is a bit upset that they're still at it (and the campus is refusing to talk to the public self-appointed liason people). The uproar here after the last proposal round was rather strong. The campus can't convience the public that there is no reason for concern, as much as they try.

Ah, Davis politics. It's a fun place to live.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Anonymous Coward]

BW is they only asymmetric method and eco/infrastructure-friendly of disposing of the hordes of Islam when the clash of civilisations becomes total war.
We should be ready.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Mindcry]

hate to tell you, but anthrax is used for lots of research besides just killing people, and more than a couple labs make it...

Re:BSL-4 labs

[aschneid]

I didn't realize they were still going to try to put one in privately. I personally like the idea and will support it.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Ellis D. Tripp]

Not in that particular strain, purity, and form it isn't.

The material used in the attacks was specially processed for use as a bioweapon. A very fine particle size, treated to prevent electrostatic clumping, etc.

That stuff was a far cry from common anthrax cultures that might be found in any microbiology lab.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Goldsmith]

So, if I want to make a vaccine, counter-virus, or sensor for Anthrax, how do you suggest I do it if I don't have access to any Anthrax virus?

I'm being honest here. I'm a scientest. I work on biosensors. Politics aside, you want me to not have access to Anthrax, SARS, or any other virus, fine. Tell me how I am supposed to help people when I can't study the problem.

If someone makes a virus, how can I tell unless I can see what a man-made virus looks like compared to a natural one?

This is why the government still has strains of these viruses running around, and why they continue to cultivate them.

I suppose we could ignore this whole thing, but then don't come complaining to me when you get sick and there's no cure.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[HokieJP]

I think he's counting that as one of the "two just outside Washington DC", although I have no clue what the other one would be.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[hesiod]

> The campus can't convience the public that there is no reason for concern

Could that be because there IS reason for concern? Isn't that exactly what this article is saying?

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Anonymous Coward]

When this was going through the process, before it ended up going to Texas, one of the disgruntled workers at CNPRC (the primate lab) brought a gun to work. UC Davis swept that under the table.

And they went about 2 weeks before the lost monkey made the news. I suppose they're trying to keep up the fine UC system that keeps Los Alamos in such great tradition: missing computers containing sensitive information, misused funds and lax controls.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[hennypenny]

Actually she was kept in quarantine for 26 or 28 days.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[TheCarp]

And you sound like one of my fellow Americans. Who seems to think that bailing them out in a war 50 years ago is good enough and now the europeans should just be our bitches and shut up about anything they don't like.

Note that YOU are the one bringing up the fact that we used atomics, and were the only ones to ever do it. He just said we are, today, hipocrits for having more WMDs than anyone and being the worlds biggest crybaby about other people getting them.

Ever note how quick "we" Aemricans are at bringing up the fact that we bailed out Europe, but the French never bring up the fact that they bailed out our revolution.

The Europeans don't get any credit when they help us out on operations we want. Guess thats ok, afterall, they seem to still "owe" us for bailing them out right? And god forbid they disagree with us on something. The bastards. The biggeset "Freedom" that my fellow Americans seem to care about is the "Freedom from dissenting opinions".

-Steve

Re:BSL-4 labs

[wohlford]

I appreciate the great detail of your comment about the Anthrax crap. But I'm skeptical of your report. No sources. Not even a simple google link.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[perrinkog]

"You forgot Fort Detrick Right between Washington D.C. and Baltimore."

Check your geography.

Here is a map showing frederick county in relation to Baltimore and DC
http://www.elainekoehl.com/Map.htm

If you picture an inverted right triangle with the 90 degree angle in the top right then Baltimore is the 90 degree, and Frederick and DC are the corners,

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Anonymous Coward]

There is one more BSL-4 lab not mentioned here- it will be constructed as an addition in the small town of Hamilton, Montana, about 30 steps (ok, 20 of my steps) from one of the densest residential areas of town. A BSL-4 in the middle of Mayberry. Kids play, dogs are walked, joggers jog, and everything else, right along the fence facing the streets of old, high end real estate.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Ironclad2]

I doubt you'd be able to stay on the beach long.

I used to live in one of the towns along the Connecticut shoreline near Plum. My friend's family owned a boatyard in said town.

He told me a story once of a guy whose old motorboat, for some reason or another, began to swamp. The guy frequented to boat yard my friend owned, so they knew him to be reputable.

So, he made haste for the nearest spot of land, which happened to be Plum Island. Within not five minutes of beaching his limping craft, a jeep drove up. In the back were four soldiers, in fatigues, carrying M-16's.

"You must leave the island now. This is Government property, and you are trespassing."

"Hey, my boat's having trouble. Do you have a radio I could use to call ashore and have someone come get me."

"No, you must leave now."

"But my boat is sinking."

"Sir, for the last time, you must leave immediately, otherwise we will use force!"

So the guy pushed off the beach and began motoring back towards the CT shore. A few minutes later, a Coast Guard cutter just happened to spot his almost-sunk boat, after they had received a radio call from a source who identified themself as a shore radio.

So yeah. Plum has a local history of intrigue and mysteriousness that goes way back.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[pyrosoft]

Just one scientific nitpick: antrax is caused by Bacillus anthracis, a bacterium, not a virus. The organisms that cause SARS, Ebola fever, smallpox, and various other bioweapons-related diseases are viruses.

As an added aside to the rest of your comment, live complete organisms are by no means required for every facet of preventative/palliative research such as vaccine development. Plenty of great discoveries have been made using crippled viruses, model organisms, expression vectors, cell culture, transgenic animals, recombinant proteins, etc. etc. I can learn a great deal about the primary anthrax toxins by studying/manipulating the DNA and purified proteins without ever having to culture the bug in the lab. I'm not trying to be mean, but I'm also a scientist (microbiology/immunology) and have slightly more experience with these sorts of things than you appear to. You might want to get your facts straight before spouting off.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[mrsteele]

Sorry, there is no BSL-4 in Davis. UCD was recently competing for federal money to build one, but were not chosen.

Part of the reason might have to do with the fact that the town was vociferously opposed to the idea, even though there isn't a BSL-4 anywhere on the West Coast.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[pyrosoft]

They are generally located near population centers because that's where the research is being performed - at universities, pharm/biotech companies, and other organizations. It's hard enough to attract top-notch talent to one of these places without having it be in the middle of nowhere. There was a very interesting article in The Scientist last month about working in one of these places. Not so much fun as you'd think.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Free_Meson]

I'm being honest here. I'm a scientest. I work on biosensors. Politics aside, you want me to not have access to Anthrax, SARS, or any other virus, fine. Tell me how I am supposed to help people when I can't study the problem.

Anthrax is a bacteria, not a virus. What work on biosensors do you do as a "scientest" that you don't know this?

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Anonymous Coward]

WMD's are the perfect rationale for preemptive warfare. You can accuse any country of developing them and its impossible for the target country to prove they don't. Every nation in the world has dual use industrial equipment that can be redirected to chemical and biological weapons production and the Bush administration cynically uses this fact to suggest a target country is a danger because they have tanks thats could be used to ferment biological weapons, for example.

Meanwhile those who are anti-Bush cynically ignore the mounds of evidence on the Iraqi nuclear programs, the mounds of evidence in the Iraqi chemical program, the actual usage in warfare of biological and chemical agents by the Iraqi's...

Re:BSL-4 labs

[SatanicPuppy]

The only thing about that story that worries me is the fact that a three hour power outage could cause that much havok. They work with some scary stuff there.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Goldsmith]

I appreciate the correction, and I don't think you're being mean, so don't worry about it.

The model organisms, expression vectors and cell cultures do not come strait out of nature into our labs. They were modified, or created by other scientests. Is finding a way to generate pure anthrax toxin weapons research or usefull biology?

We're both saying that it is usefull biology. I don't WANT to work with live bugs. I want someone to give me the protein so I can try and detect it, but in order to do that we need someone to do something that looks a lot like weapons research to the rest of the world.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[MightyYar]

I googled and found mentions of this mostly on anti-Semitic conspiracy sites, but Salon also has an article, along with Independent:

Salon

Independent

However, they are both premium-only articles. I'd say the parent is probably a bigot. But he might just be ignorant. I don't know him, so that may not be fair. Most of these "sources" take great pains to point out that Zack is Jewish.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Anonymous Coward]

And you sound like one of my fellow Americans. Who seems to think that bailing them out in a war 50 years ago is good enough and now the europeans should just be our bitches and shut up about anything they don't like.


Nope. I honestly could care less about Europe and Japan. My opinion is that we made a mistake getting involved over there in the first place. I would rather us have taken the same stand we did with the French revolution and stayed neutral. There were good reasons our founders chose that route. Europe is good enough at being its own bitch without us. The point I was attempting to make is that Europe is not only first in line to slam us, they're also first in line with their hands out when they need help. Maybe we should just stop helping all together next time we're asked. Freedom comes at a price -- America continually pays in blood for everyone else's freedom when those for whom we fight could care less about that freedom we provide them, including the freedom to complain about it.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Goldsmith]

I work on using carbon nanotubes to electronically detect conformational changes in proteins.

I'm a condensed matter physicist, who sadly lacks the encyclopedic knowledge of my biology collegues.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[IncohereD]

Could that be because there IS reason for concern? Isn't that exactly what this article is saying?

What IS concerning is that engineers are allowed to go on strike at a mission-critical facility. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be allowed in Canada, from what I remember from Professional Practice class. Hell, we can be denied bereavement leave if lives are in danger. And we have no minimum wage.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[tylernt]

vociferously

Darn, I don't see a +1 Vocabulary.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[riprjak]

Bugger me with a fish fork!! Any sane government should have declared a union whose action DIRECTLY LEADS to the risk of release of contagions which *NEED* BSL-4 as a terrorist group and taken military action long before now.

As for safety, I was under the impression that BSL-4's required incendiary self-destruct in case of catastrophic failure of containment; at least they do here in Australia. Of course, AFAIK we only have 1 here.

Of course, this is assuming that people are forgetting to refuel your on-site diesel generators and the solar panels are not cleaned regularly; you *DO* have power backup for a facility where failure leads to human-at-risk situations, do you not???

err!
jak

Re:BSL-4 labs

[cheekyboy]

They could always turn it into a cool pool/bar room for all the staff.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[gujo-odori]

Ummm, Ft. Detrick is mentioned clearly in the article, no need to list it again. Oh, you didn't read it? Never mind :-)

Re:BSL-4 labs

[chimpo13]

When you read the article, it says she was sent home to pack before going into quarantine. Lovely.

Re:BSL-4 labs

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bit simpler than that.

Someone complaining about the techniques used to bail them out of a far worse future is the concern here. Not some drunken idiots bitching that the frenchies should have supported our war in Iraq because "without us they'd all be talking the german!"

Can you imagine what the world would have been like if Stalin or Hitler had gotten the bomb first? How about if the US hadn't gotten there at all, and a full on invasion of the Japanese home islands was attempted?!

In addition to being the only country to use atomic weapons in war, the US is the only country to be the sole possesor of the ultimate weapon without using it for aggressive conquest.

I suppose attempts to add balance to these kind of flamewars is futile, but yet I keep trying. Perhaps I'll go locate that vi vs emacs flamewar and try to mediate.

credible dope smokers?

[garcia]

I packed up the car, scored some weed, picked up my girlfriend and headed to the Jersey Shore, just to be on the safe side. Coincidence and stupidity will kill you just as dead as conspiracy and evil genius, if the wind is right, so we holed up in a motel in Ocean City and followed the story from there.

While I don't doubt for a second the "strangeness" of the entire operations there and the chance that there might be "leaks" coming from the island, how in the hell are OTHER people (I don't mind it so much) going to lend any credibility to a writer that says something as unnecessary as "I scored some weed" in what could have been a serious article?

Re:credible dope smokers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's called "gonzo journalism".

Except, ideally, the gonzo journalist actually DOES something while possibly under the influence and writes about it in unfettered stream-of-consciousness fashion.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas would count, except that HST himself later apologized for it, admitting that most of it was exaggerated to the point of fabrication and that anyone actually trying anything near the level described would still be rotting in prison today.

However, this is just a bunch of crap. It's not even a book review (n.b. it ends with a reference to a single book; I doubt that this man so much as bought a bus ticket) and it's certainly not journalism. Why was this linked to from /.? It reads like a parody of the style clumsily used by this author.

Re:credible dope smokers?

[ajlitt]

Here's one

Re:credible dope smokers?

[garcia]

did he routinely put useless comments about how he was going to go get baked? I doubt it. Especially that it was JUST revealed (in 99) that he was a stoner.

Re:credible dope smokers?

[oblivionboy]

In canada this is actually a *sign* of credibilty. :)

Re:credible dope smokers?

[Fiz Ocelot]

The whole article is very alarmist. Maybe he does smoke a little too much...

I mean, we need this research to better understand the diseases, and it needs to be conducted somewhere. Would it be right to move this to another country? I don't think so at all.

The better we understand these diseases the easier it will be to defeat them.

Re:credible dope smokers?

[Durindana]

Credibility aside, the writer's trying hard to emulate Hunter Thompson throughout this piece, and this part in particular is a direct allusion.

Fans of Thompson, the 'gonzo journalist' known for participating as heavily as possible in the stories he covered for various newspapers, magazines, and most recently Rolling Stone, will recognize the Jersey Shore as a place Thompson knew and loathed from a stint at a shitty newspaper there, soon after he left the Air Force in Florida and before he lit out for New York. I believe Thompson's story of how he fled town after taking out a local man's daughter and destroying the man's car is in his first volume of memoirs, The Proud Highway.

Phrases like "holed up," overuse of the word "evil," malaprop similes ("fire in a cardboard factory") and consistent reflections of the writer's own opinions and impressions - how much do you see "I" in "serious articles"? many journalists call it "going first-person," and it's virtually never done - are all Thompson touches. As are gratuitous drug references. I'm tickled by the Thompson channeling, actually, because emulating other writers' style is something Thompson himself was notorious for doing early in his career.

I personally don't think the writer's predilection to score weed has much relevance to his credibility, any more than a mainstream reporter's alcoholism might (working reporters know what I'm talking about). This writing style and drug references are meant to appeal to a particular, fringe, audience, that's all, a kind of ingratiation and location with his audience's values, whatever you think of them.

Re:credible dope smokers?

[Cloud 9]

It's the NY Press, chief. He was probably paid to put something like that in there, to retain the baby-boomer pseudo-hipster subscribers' interest.

Re:credible dope smokers?

[Cloud 9]

Well put.

Re:credible dope smokers?

[carn1fex]

Yea this is a New York Press article. For those outside NYC, the NYP isnt really a news paper as an entertaining collection of memoirs and other funny things by the writers with some minimal investigative reports around town about city officials. Most of the articles are things like "today i was riding to work and a homeless woman grabbed my laptop and pissed on it!" etc. I love the paper but this story is over its head I would expect before reading this.

Re:credible dope smokers?

[torpor]

you're right. world annihilation as a result of something creepy escaping from Evil American Laboratories is a poor excuse to grab your girl, a bag of weed, and head to a motel for the weekend.

who needs an excuse. i'd do that anyway, if i had a girlfriend ...

Re:credible dope smokers?

[Anonymous Coward]

then it shouldn't have been classified as a "Science" and more of "Science fiction" or "fucking nonsense".

If you want Fear and Loathing shit go watch the DVD or better yet, read the novel. I don't expect to see that on the front page of a "news" site under a "serious" category.

Re:credible dope smokers?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really don't mind the reference so much, why point it out?

Personally, I lend more credibility to fellow weed smokers. We know something the others don't; that's why we bring it up.

Re:credible dope smokers?

[veg_all]

Don't mind that. These two sentences are automatically prepended to every NYPress story before publication to augment "street-cred."

Re:credible dope smokers?

[alienmole]

I'm curious about whether you think it was a good emulation of Hunter Thompson. I read some of Thompson's work a long time ago, and my memory is that it was a lot more compelling. With this article, I should have been interested - the topic interests me in general - but I found the piece was just fluffy and melodramatic. That's not what I remember Thompson being like.

Re:credible dope smokers?

[datababe72]

He lost all credibility when he wrote that Ebola can be spread by a sneeze. This is just not true. None of the known strains that infect humans have ever been shown to spead via the air. It requires close contact with the infected persons blood or other secretions. There is a primate strain (Reston, I believe) that may spread via the air, but this is not proven, and the current theory is that if airborn transmission in fact occurred, it was due to lab conditions not likely to replicated in natural settings.

If people want to freak people out about infectious diseases, they should at least get their facts straight.

Personally, I'm far more bothered by our practice of including antibiotics in animal feed than by the existence of specialized research facilities to study particularly nasty disease. For the latter to make me sick, I have to have some really spectacularly bad luck. For the former to make me sick, evolution just has to do its thing....

Re:credible dope smokers?

[Durindana]

All in all, I agree with you.

I don't think it approached Thompson's ability to draw in the reader with serious-minded commentary leavened with mad wit. Thompson's great strength was his genuine passion for his subjects, and his lucidity despite the often-gratuitous drug tales.

This piece felt to me like a wisecracker typing as fast as possible, throwing in some superficial flourishes but maintaining a faux-jaded eye and a grating air of worldliness that really turned me off. That sounds pretty harsh, and I suppose it is; but it's much easier to fill the old inverted pyramid than it is to approach a mainstream story from a truly counterculture perspective. Traditional methods don't let you fall as hard; trying to emulate Hunter Thompson and failing just gets ugly.

Go Duct Tape

[ePhil_One]

Is there no end to its miracle powers?

Re:Go Duct Tape

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

Give me a 200 million dollar research budget and I'd be happy to tape up as many vials full of germs as you want.

Re:Go Duct Tape

[JosKarith]

Everyone knows Duct Tape is the Force in handy little rolls - it has a Light side, it has a Dark side and it hold the universe together.
Jos

Re:Go Duct Tape

[metlin]

You have no idea. ;-)

Re:Go Duct Tape

[Temporal Outcast]

You have no idea, either ;-)

Re:Go Duct Tape

[eclectus]

The difference between duct tape & the Force is that 'May the Force be with you' sounds a lot better than 'may you be covered in duct tape'.

Re:Go Duct Tape

[Stopmotioncleaverman]

Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Dirac, Faraday, Planck, Kelvin, Maxwell and Einstein believed in God. So do I.

Interesting actually. Einstein didn't. A common misconception amongst many religious groups in some desperate hope to hang onto some credibility in this age of reason and common sense, is that Einstein was religious, and believed in god.

While a Jew by descent, he had no religious beliefs of his own - in fact when this nonsense was brought to his attention he was indignant at the suggestion:

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religion then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.". (From Albert Einstein, "The Human Side", ed. H. Dukas and B. Hoffman (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981).

Re:Go Duct Tape

[Short Circuit]

That quote doesn't make sense. I saw a video clip of him announcing something (I don't remember what) in Germany, while Nazis were on the rise. He something like "I am re-affirming my existance as a scientist...and a Jew." (That's a seriously butchered quote so far as my mind can recall.)

Re:Go Duct Tape

[operagost]

I'm sure there's a fetish site on the web for that.

Re:Go Duct Tape

[NickFitz]

Presumably he was referring to his being of the Jewish people, not of the Jewish faith. AFAIK, the Nazis didn't persecute the Jews because of their religion but because they were regarded as an inferior race. I don't think anybody escaped the death camps because they never went to the synagogue.

Re:Go Duct Tape

[dillon_rinker]

Reason, as you use the term, is a mode of thought formalized by the ancient Greeks. It has proven to be wildly successful at certain limited areas of human endeavour. Perhaps you've observed the utter failure of reason in changing the behavior of human beings?

Common sense, according to you, is denying the existence of a category of entities that EVERY HUMAN CULTURE has believed in. If everyone says the sky is blue and you maintain that the sky is actually a maroon paisley, then I'd suggest that common sense goes against you. I don't say that common sense is always right, but you can hardly maintain that the believe of an overwhelming minority is common sense.

Now, to take issue with the substance of your claim, that Einstein didn't believe in any divine entity, I'd have to disagree. Note that Einstein (in 1951) is different from Einstein (in 1895). Are you saying that Einstein, at no point in his life, held a belief in the divine? Do you have a source for this?

Re:Go Duct Tape

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever tape a duct with it.
Your lucky if it lasts a month.
In fact it's the most useless tape in the world for anything other than a temporary fix.
Miracle ended.

Re:Go Duct Tape

[tealover]

Affirming your jewishness could mean that you are reaffirming your cultural background, not necessarily the religion itself.

Re:Go Duct Tape

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go...

Re:Go Duct Tape

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK, the Nazis didn't persecute the Jews because of their religion but because they were regarded as an inferior race.

While admittedly Hitler beleived everyone not of "Aryan" descent was from an inferior race, he singled them out because of their perceived roles in banking, and other businesses. With the economic collapse of Germany following WWI, it was a group that he could single out and pin the blame on, since his early campaign against the homosexuals had caused those who survived to go into hiding.

Its a common tactic still. You're not poor / our country isn't going downhill / your kids aren't out of control because of anything you did, its that lousy no good "Group A" (Group A can be any minority, based on religious or sexual preference, national background, skin color, etc)style of dress, social class, etc.)

Its kind of comical to see Bush trying it, but scary at the same time. Appearantly its the "homosexuals" that are ruining the fine establishment of marriage, not the heterosexuals that are getting divorced at a rate of one for every two marriages.

Scary..

[grub]

We don't have level 4 labs where I work (levels 1-3 only), but we have emergency backup power that kicks in in under 10 seconds. Why on earth would this place not have that?

Re:Scary..

[Servo]

that was my first thought too. Either this is fabricated, or someone is a complete idiot in managing/building the facility.

Re:Scary..

[jayrtfm]

because the funds for it were spent on a new gym and landscaping.
seriously.
It's documented in the book "Lab 257"

Re:Scary..

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoops, I typod. We have level 1 and 2 here. no 3.

Re:Scary..

[phurley]

According to the article :grin: they had three; however they failed due to either:

1. Poor maintance by "scab" workers
2. Sabotage by striking maintance works.

(not good either way), but it does answer your question.

Re:Scary..

[Fnkmaster]

A more useful question is why on earth is striking allowed at this kind of facility? I mean, I appreciate the right to collective bargaining and unionization, but that right has certain bounds in facilities of national security importance like this.

I think the public's right to safety from level 4 biohazard's trumps the right of facilities engineers at this place to strike, any day. Whoever let such a situation occur in the first place should be held personally responsible for any injuries or deaths caused by inadequate, incompetent maintenance at this place.

Re:Scary..

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>we have emergency backup power that kicks in in under 10 seconds. Why on earth would this place not have that?

The article saith, " I found the failure of all three of the island's backup generators particularly provocative". In other words, they did have emergency backup power but somehow bungled keeping it operational.

Re:Scary..

[merlin_jim]

RTFA... it mentions that there were 3 backup generators, and that they all failed to start. The article hints that the cause may be inadequately trained temporary works, hired when the engineers responsible for maintaining the generators went on strike 5 months previous to the incident.

Re:Scary..

[DangerSteel]

I'm with Fnkmaster on this one. Those engineers should not even be allowed to strike. I read about police and firefighters who are ordered by judges back to work, and the two sides ordered to keep negotiating. This is on that scale of public safety at least.

...on another note, behind my toilet is at least a level 3 lab, and I don't even have battery backup...

Re:Scary..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had read the article you'd know that the maintenance workers in charge of the generators had been on strike for 5 months and the scabs didn't have enough training to get them running during the outage.

Re:Scary..

[glenrm]

Should you be able to strike if you work at such a facility?

Re:Scary..

[Anonymous Coward]

I did RTFA but not CE (Closely Enough) :(

Re:Scary..

[Short Circuit]

Collective bargaining, currently being one of the few bargaining tools useful in a wide range of environments, needs to be available.

It's like outlawing the ability of government workers to strike. If you do, they're now working on their employer's terms. And their employer may not have their best interest at heart. Or even balanced interests.

I'd love to see an effective alternative, though. In my negligible experience, unions tend to get greedy. I understand a school's staff not wanting to take half their pay out for insurance, but I don't understand seniority-over-value rules that end up in place in unionized factories.

Re:Scary..

[Short Circuit]

We need a better employee-employer negotiating mechanism to eliminate the necessity of strikes.

A collective lawsuit might work; let the two sides argue the facts in front of a judge or a jury.

Re:Scary..

[DigiShaman]

I call BS on the 2nd one. I mean, why in the HELL would any scientist put the human race in harms way just to spite their employer? That would be like me rigging an airplanes engine to explode once it reached 10,000 ft, just to make a point about my current status of employment.

And if this in fact the case... SCARY!!! Our government has a much bigger underlining issue at hand with the people they employ. And as a citizen of the US, I want a full investigation into such matters.

Re:Scary..

[HokieJP]

Well, Police and Firefighters are government employees (except the volunteers), and government employees are not allowed to strike. These people, as government contractors, may, technically, be allowed to strike, but I'm with you in thinking that they shouldn't.

I would like to point out, though, that this is yet another downside of the privatization so touted by politicians these days.

Re:Scary..

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

The article hints that the cause may be inadequately trained temporary works, hired when the engineers responsible for maintaining the generators went on strike 5 months previous to the incident.

Sorry, but it doesn't take rocket science or brain surgery to maintain a back-up generator. The idea that they hired scabs that had no clue about back-up generators is unlikely.

The most probable reality is that the strikers sabotaged the equipment. Use your head.

Re:Scary..

[HokieJP]

Well, labor disputes are frequently subject to arbitration, which is a similar process to what you propose.

You can't actually file a lawsuit against your employer just because you want better annual raises or a lower dental co-pay. Even in our land of litigation, one is only supposed to file a lawsuit when laws are actually broken.

Re:Scary..

[merlin_jim]

The most probable reality is that the strikers sabotaged the equipment. Use your head.

I neither agree nor disagree with your statement. I did use my head. What my head told me is that I have far too few facts of the matter to make a decision. I have read one anecdotal-style news item of the incident. I have not even confirmed as fact that the facility in question exists, let alone verified one single statement in this report.

I do not believe that you have any more information than I do, yet you choose to come to a conclusion from one admittedly biased source.

I did not choose to come to such a conclusion.

Re:Scary..

[afidel]

NO.
Presidential order has stopped many classes of federal workers from striking and private individuals can be forced to cease striking under the Taft-Hartley Act which Bush used to reopen west coast ports. If he can force dock workers whos actions only result in economic impact back to work then surely he has the authority to force safety critical workers as well. Of course it would never be done because that would draw way too much attention to the fact that there is a bioweapons and severly contagious disease facility just miles from long island.

Re:Scary..

[BDZ]

I have no problem with the workers striking. What I do have a problem with is allowing them to picket or whatever on the island. Why were striking and unhappy workers allowed anywhere near the generators. You'd think they'd have to strike wherever the goverment ferry picked them up. Not on the island.

Re:Scary..

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, come on, we've all read about union THUGS bashing the heads in of people crossing picket lines. Among other very violent tactics to strengthen thier strike.

Anymore unions are about power and not about workers rights etc. Yes, a lot of thier activities use workers as a disguise, but really its about power. The more powerful and controling the unions can be, the more thier leaders can have. Union workers are pawns in this chess game, I realize that sometimes there are semi-legitimate reasons to strike, but then the union turns it into forcing huge concessions from the company--far more than what the original strike was about.

This is of course why I refuse to join a union ever, too bad Montana isn't right to work. So if its a union job i have to be union to work it. I can't of my own free will work, but rather have to work on the UNION terms. So since when was having to work on the UNIONS terms better than having to work on the EMPLOYERS terms? It isn't, since neither are working on your OWN terms, which is why I won't work union, period.

Re:Scary..

[Smidge204]

"Maintenance workers" aren't scientists. Scientists have Master's and PhD's from accredited universities, Maintenance workers have certification from DeVry Institute of Technology (sometimes...)

This is not to say they are immoral or stupid, but perhaps they don't quite understand how dangerous the stuff that goes on in the labs can be, and important those systems are. They don't design those systems, only fix them (which requires no knowledge of what it actually does)
=Smidge=

Re:Scary..

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said the maintenance workers were scientists? Anyway, people are stupid.

Re:Scary..

[Anonymous Coward]

Three words:

Disaster Recovery Plan

Re:Scary..

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Good point, if /. had editing ability for posts, I probibly would have added: Consider the source. Some flaky sensational NYNY tabloid rag...

Re:Scary..

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

There is a union strike at Thriftway (grocery chain like Safeway) here. The union is advertising in the Help Wanted ads for picketers. Need not be a union member...

Re:Scary..

[kabocox]

Oh, No.
Domestic Terrorism!
Everyone of those striking workers will have to be processed just to make sure they are not a potential threat to the US general populace.

Re:Scary..

[DigiShaman]

Ahh, but the thought process is more or less the same. I may not be a scientist. But when I have to work on a network or trouble shoot a windows box (and it's hardware), the thought process IS scientific in deducing the cause and finding a solution.

But regardless, I don't care if your a farmer or someone with a PhD. Everyone is held accountable in what they do. And if you don't feel that is the case, that I urge those people to find work that does NOT put people in harms way due to lack of judgement.

Re:Scary..

[qtp]

Should you be able to strike if you work at such a facility?

Should such a facility be run by people who will create enough hostility among the workforce that they would sabotage the equipment.

If the job is as important as the maintenance of the security and reliability of saftey and backup equipment at a disease research facility, you've got to be willing to pay.

If you take away the right to strike, then you've simply removed the legal means to protest unfair conditions. The workers will act out in other ways if the legal paths are all blocked, and at a facility such as the one in the article, that could mean something much worse than the disruption of a strike.

Re:Scary..

[Deflagro]

"There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now."

This may be offtopic but i like that sig... I'd have to say we're now at the "jury" level.
Your free speech is gone, your vote hardly matters anymore. The court system is the only thing keeping this country together, and when that's gone...well, get a gun cuz it's gonna get messy.

I just always liked that sig,

Re:Scary..

[merlin_jim]

Good point, if /. had editing ability for posts, I probibly would have added: Consider the source. Some flaky sensational NYNY tabloid rag...

I can't say how many times I wished I could go back and correct some post or other... :)

Of course that's completely off topic...

Re:Scary..

[Smidge204]

Having dealt with many "Service technicians" and "maintenance workers", I can assure you it's rare they apply any kind of scientific process... unless maybe we're not using the same definition?

The process is a lot more like a premade flowchart. "Does it work?" (Y/N), "Is it turning over?" {Y/N), "Is there fuel?" (Y/N)... each step is usually followed by routine inspections of various components t make sure everything is where it should be. It's all very robotic. Sometimes an experienced person can take a shortcut because he recognizes the problem, but it's still not scientific. It's rhetoric.

Even the most highly qualified and experienced technician will not be able to tell you how to build an engine. That's a surprisingly big leap in skill. This is because they don't fully understand the underlying principles of it's operation: Kinematics, Thermodynamics, Chemistry, Fluid Dynamics, Material science, etc. Knowledge and use of those principles would constitute science.

Good example: ask a technician what it means when an engine is "running rich". They'll probably tell you it means there's too much fuel and not enough air, which is true, but you'll be lucky if they can actually explain why that hurts the engine's performance.

Chances are, when you go to fix your network, you have some knowledge of the underlying principles: Protocol abstraction, networking theory, maybe even basic electronics. Using those principles is pretty much required because so few of the problems with computer networks are physical. That would consitute science.

Now, about being held accountable: I definitely agree! I was only suggesting that maybe they didn't fully understand the repercussions of their actions.
=Smidge=

Re:Scary..

[Lucidwray]

Boy no kidding.. Its kinda sad when my web site of family photos has more powerbackup than a Bio-Safety Level 4 (BSL-4) research facility.

Re:Scary..

[DigiShaman]

"Even the most highly qualified and experienced technician will not be able to tell you how to build an engine. That's a surprisingly big leap in skill. This is because they don't fully understand the underlying principles of it's operation: Kinematics, Thermodynamics, Chemistry, Fluid Dynamics, Material science, etc. Knowledge and use of those principles would constitute science."

What you describe there would fall under the principle of engineering. In fact, if you look it up on Dictionary.com, you get "The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends such as the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems."

And I can tell you that being a technician and a scientist are one in the same (more or less). Hell, even scientist use flow charts. Also, scientists will even use advanced mathematic formulas without even understanding how those formulas were created. For example, you might understand E=MC2 or even Pi in application. But, can you (on your own with pen and paper) provide pre-existing math to reflect the nature of these two formulas?

Re:Scary..

[shotfeel]

RTFA... it mentions that there were 3 backup generators, and that they all failed to start

And we know that's true because...

I'm not saying its not true, I just haven't had a chance yet to verify it through another source. Does anybody else have any info regarding this particular event other than the article in question?

Re:Scary..

[Smidge204]

I agree with your deifinition of "engineering", even though that has little to do with my point. Engineering requires science, and essentially engineers are "applied scientists". Technicians generally do not have scientific backgrounds and so are neither scientists nor engineers.

As a mechanical engineer, I can assure you that I don't do every single calculation by hand. So use of reference tables is completely irrelevant, and I frequently use all sorts of equations I can't even begin to understand. I really don't care to, since lacking that knowledge doesn't effect my ability to do the job. However, I have to be familiar with the basic principles at work, because that does effect my work. The understanding and application of those principles is what makes it science.

From Dictionary.com: Science is "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena". That's not what most technicians do. More often than not it's a cookbook of experience and common procedure to correct a problem. No actual knowledge of the underlying principles of operation are required and typically the guy is only vaugely familiar with their existance, let alone content.

A car mechanic will probably not know much about thermodynamics or kinematics, even though he'll recharge your AC sytem and balance your tires.

A serviceman working on your home heating system probably doesn't know much about fluid mechanics or electronics, even though he may replace the pump and install a new digital controller.

A steelworker probably doesn't know much about structural design and stress analysis, even though he welds and bolts the frame of a building together.

Again, this is not to say they can't understand it, only that it isn't what they were trained to do. It's not required to do the job.
=Smidge=

Re:Scary..

[AJWM]

You can add Limbaugh and Bush's IQs together and it couldn't boil water.

Well, duh! You've got a units mismatch. At what IQ does water boil?

The level of scientific illiteracy in this country these days.... sigh.

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

[rafael_es_son]

Well, looks like Dr. Lecter won't get his vacation RSN.

Re:Tsk, tsk, tsk.

[Tackhead]

> Well, looks like Dr. Lecter won't get his vacation RSN.

It puts the fucking Ebola in the pressure-contained work area!

Yet another example ...

[torpor]

... of how fundamentally irresponsible we have become as a species, and ignorant we all are of just how a few people, with their endless justifications for 'research' endanger us all.

oh, i'm sure this 'bio-lab' has its legitimate uses. do we really need more weapons-grade anthrax, though, really? asian bird flu really needs human helping hands to become the higher species?

i dunno. shit like this makes me start to think, maybe ... just maybe ... some of those dirty A-Rabs might just have a point about the U.S. ...

Re:Yet another example ...

[BillFarber]

some of those dirty A-Rabs might just have a point about the U.S.

A statement like that kind of destroys all credibility of the author.

Re:Yet another example ...

[cybermace5]

He was trying to make a statement about his perception of the rest of us, not about Arabs. Because, you know, we're all rednecks who want to just nuke the "dirty A-Rabs" and get it done with. And we'd spread weapons-grade biological sludge on our toast, if we thought it'd go well with a beer.

Re:Yet another example ...

[DjMd]

Uh hello?
weapons-grade anthrax...

You aren't suggesting that this lab has this are you? Cause this is Plum Island Animal Disease Center
But I mean yeah! diseases are dangerous they could kill us. We should totally stop reasearching them, cause while research might provide us with treatments, vacinations, and all that, there is a small chance that the disease could escape. Better to get rid our research...

Sorry for the Trolling, but it's almost like watching Wargames and Terminator and saying lets get rid of computers...

Re:Yet another example ...

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah man, good thing Anthrax isn't an animal disease or anything.

Re:Yet another example ...

[Anonymous Coward]

True, and I am sure that Cows carry Weapons Grade anthrax

Re:Yet another example ...

[fozzmeister]

Actually I don't think it does, If he hates Arabs (which may or may not be true) it does not necessarily mean he can't make a judgement about his own country (which may or may not be true).

Re:Yet another example ...

[nate1138]

Uh hello?

Weapons-grade anthrax is a definite possibility. The facility was taken over by the Department of Homeland security.

Re:Yet another example ...

[torpor]

A statement like that kind of destroys all credibility of the author.

Yeah? Why is that? Because its possible that some of the objections that the Arab community have about America may in fact be true? That they may be applicable? That they may have a point?

The fact that America's enemies may actually have a point may have escaped some of you, I know ... but just think about it. What exactly is the reason for having such devastating facilities?

"Protection of the American Homeland".

Great. Thanks. The rest of the world, dying of new strains of Tuberculosis cooked up in your ivory towers, will be very happy to know that America is protected from its 'enemies' ...

Re:Yet another example ...

[torpor]

Just for the record, I don't agree with redneck "A-rab" assessments. I was, in fact, trying to be 'tongue-in-cheek', though I understand this may have been a little too complicated a nuance for some Reality TV types ... oops, there I go again ... okay I'll stop now ...

Re:Yet another example ...

[BillFarber]

I'm not saying your statement was wrong. Simply that how you say things affects how seriously your comments are taken. I think that the fact that your original post was moderated as flamebait supports me.

Re:Yet another example ...

[Tackhead]

> And we'd spread weapons-grade biological sludge on our toast, if we thought it'd go well with a beer.

You keep the Australians and their vegemite out of this!

Re:Yet another example ...

[torpor]

its true, being mod'ed as flamebait probably means i was being flamebait'y.

but it could also mean that i've made a point that nobody likes to think about.

backup gens?

[British]

Hospitals have backup generators. Why not have them there for the essential life-or-death systems?

Re:backup gens?

[evilad]

Ah yes, this confused me at first as well. Then the answer hit me: YOU CAN'T READ.

Re:backup gens?

[prat393]

The article states that they have three, actually, but for whatever reason, they all failed simultaneously.

Re:backup gens?

[Dun Malg]

Hospitals have backup generators. Why not have them there for the essential life-or-death systems?

They have 3 separate generators. Somehow, all three were happened to fail simultaneously during an engineer's strike. Looks like sabotage by disgruntled workers to me.

Re:backup gens?

[Tassach]

Looks like sabotage by disgruntled workers to me

Remember Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

While sabotage is indeed a possibility, I find it far more likely that the scabs hired to replace the striking engineers never bothered to RTFM, never ran an equipment test, and never had a drill or simulated outage.

In that kind of facility, they should have been running a monthly, if not weekly, test of the backup systems. The most likely explanation to me is that there was a breakdown in operational procedure, possibly because the procedures weren't documented. If the policy is that you run a periodic systems test, then you need to document the fact that you need to run a test along with the instructions needed to carry out the test.

"Fred runs the test every Tuesday; get him to show you how to do it" doesn't cut it, particuarly if Fred goes on strike or gets run over by a bus. It's management's responsibility to make sure that all the critical operational procedures are documented and that they are being followed on an ongoing basis. This obviously did not happen in this case -- even if the generators were sabotaged, the damage should have been detected at the next test.

Re:backup gens?

[Dun Malg]

even if the generators were sabotaged, the damage should have been detected at the next test.

Good point. The fact that they had three backup power units go bad in a not-immediately-repairable way in the same time frame looks like sabotage, but the fact that such non-functionality was overlooked indicates ineptitude as well. Personally, having seen a LOT of backup generator systems working as an electrician in Las Vegas hotels, I suspect the one-two combo of sabotage-stupidity. There's not much of those generators that building engineering has access to. Fuel tanks, starter panel, and switch gear, mostly. Can't imagine what could've been done to them through "bad maintenance" that could keep them offline.

Re:backup gens?

[Tassach]

It could have been something as simple as an interlock being left on accidentally, or the auto-start switch being turned off, or some equivilent bit of user error / ignorance.

The building in which I used to work was attached to two seperate power grids -- if one grid went down, it was supposed to switch over automatically to the other grid within 10 seconds. Well, one day the the active grid went down and it didn't switch over. The reason? User error. I don't know the details but apparantly the building engineer didn't reset everything correctly after the last scheduled test.

Re:backup gens?

[Dun Malg]

It could have been something as simple as an interlock being left on accidentally, or the auto-start switch being turned off, or some equivilent bit of user error / ignorance.

But that would only explain why they didn't come on automatically. Something had to be wrong enough with all three generators that they couldn't just flip the switch on the generator panel to "manual" and press "start".

phhhewwww

[DR SoB]

At first I was scared, but a little calculation shows me I'm at least 500 miles away here in Toronto, pheew. This stuff is completely insane, why do we need 802412904158132951249812 weapons that are all capable of destroying life on earth, I mean, isn't 1 enough???

Re:phhhewwww

[skrysakj]

I mean, isn't 1 enough???

Nope, 2 are needed at the very least in case the first doesn't do the job. Those two also need to have backups in case they rust away, decay, are stolen, or destroyed pre-emptively. Oh, in that case let's make two more to stop people who may destroy them pre-emptively, and also two more for those... etc..

That line of thinking continues until you have thousands of WMDs, instead of just one. A vicious cycle in a dangerous game.

Re:phhhewwww

[HeghmoH]

We don't even have one. The very best we can do is kill a whole lot of people and put a big dent in civilization. But we can't even come close to killing all of humanity, much less all life.

Re:phhhewwww

[JonTurner]

Because there are other people in the world who possess these weapons (or seek them desperately), and they have the intention to use them against people, either in their home countries (see: Northern Kurds in Iraq) or in Western countries (e.g. US/Canada/Britian/France/etc.) Labs such as the one at Plum Island investigate the effects of disease-causing agents and bioweapons in the hopes that remedies/cures/vaccines/treatments might be discovered.

*That's* why weapons like this are needed. Because others have them, too.

PS. Your distance from the lab isn't significant. As SARS has demonstrated, a swift moving easily communicated disease doesn't recognize national borders. Yes, it's scary, but so is the alternative -- having NO research at all.

Re:phhhewwww

[DR SoB]

"Labs such as the one at Plum Island investigate the effects of disease-causing agents and bioweapons in the hopes that remedies/cures/vaccines/treatments might be discovered.
"

Yes, that is what your government would like me to believe....

Re:phhhewwww

[eth00]

All goes back to the cold war thinking of MAD, mutually assured destruction, you kill me and I will kill 10x more of your people.

Re:phhhewwww

[shystershep]

That would just be boring. It's all about choice, man.

Re:phhhewwww

[Hard_Code]

Then we should only need exactly enough amount to deter those people. I think any capability beyond the capability to utterly destroy them over a few times, would be totally pointless. I can destroy you 100 times, but you can only destroy me 50 times! I WIN!

Re:phhhewwww

[s20451]

We have enough WMD to destroy the earth 1000 times over, that's PLENTY to wipe out 100% of life (not including cockroaches I guess..).

I'm all for confronting the realities of WMD, but I don't like misleading statistics that are meant to frighten.

Statistics of this kind take the known casualties from Hiroshima and Nagasaki "per kiloton", and then multiply them by the number of kilotons in the Earth's arsenal. Thus, the only way we could kill all the humans on Earth 1000 times over is if they all agreed to gather together in one place and stay exposed.

Nuclear weapons are not as mystically destructive as people think. Yes, in a massive nuclear exchange, most large urban areas would be decimated, and fallout would claim many more. But it's relatively simple to protect yourself against blast and fallout, as long as you have a bit of warning and the bomb doesn't fall on top of your head.

And as for the article, none of the pathogens that were mentioned, such as Ebola, Anthrax, or Hantavirus, are massively contagious.

Ironically, I think people are so frightened of the exaggerated destructive power of these weapons that they try not to think about them and hope they go away. I think more people need to confront their reality, and scare tactics don't help.

Re:phhhewwww

[Anonymous Coward]

...most large urban areas would be decimated...

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Re:phhhewwww

[Zathrus]

a little calculation shows me I'm at least 500 miles away here in Toronto

Well, since you want to play the tinfoil hat game -- you're dead.

For a bioweapon to be truely effective it has to have a reasonable infection and transmission period -- followed by rapid death. If the transmission period is too short then it won't spread because carriers will die before they can infect others. (Which is why a lot of really nasty viruses, like Ebola, are rare and have small kill clusters). If a military grade bioweapon got out without warning then you run a high risk of being infected by someone on a plane. Want to avoid it? Move to a small town at least a couple hundred miles away from any large city. AKA - the middle of nowhere.

Alternately, you could actually do some research on BSL4 facilities. Do you think that researching things like hantavirus, Ebola, lyme disease, antibiotic resistant strains of strep and TB, and other contagious and (currently) incurable diseases isn't worthwhile?

Of course, you'll just tug your tinfoil cap on tighter and claim that all they're really doing is bioweapons research. Sure. Whatever.

No, I'm not claiming they don't do bioweapon research (particularly Fort Dietrich), but a lot of that research is in how to defeat enemy bioweapons. Or your own, for that matter. Bioweapons have a nasty habit of indiscriminantly infecting everyone -- not just your "enemy". Which is why they are technically illegal to use in warfare.

Re:phhhewwww

[Bob(TM)]

Well, apparently, it is a US Department of Agriculture facility. It appears to be have been established for research into diseases afflicting agriculture.

Seems to be a pretty legitimate area of research in it's own right. You'd want a highly rigorously contained facility so you don't run the risk of a nasty escaping and killing off all the cows (or people) on the eastern seaboard. There doesn't have to be a defense component to justify it.

Add to it the bioterror and defense issues, particularly as they relate to effects on agriculture and food supply, and it seems like a rational (albeit a little unsettling) approach for gov funded research.

Re:phhhewwww

[Anonymous Coward]

This is completely incorrect and that group you cited is HEAVILY biased against US nuclear policy(i.e. they always say WE must disarm first AND lower our defenses). The vast majority of the US nuclear armament is sub-100 kiloton tactical nuclear weapons. These are not designed to cause destruction over the maximum area but to destroy targets that cannot be hit by conventional means(missle silos, underground command centers). Never mind the US does not have a capability to launch even 20% of its warheads before a counterstrike eliminates its ability to launch anymore.
This doesn't even address the fact that both the US and the Soviets both have limited ABM systems in place as authorized by numerous treaties(the treaties allow protection of command and control centers).

Re:phhhewwww

[DR SoB]

That's not what the article said, it said UP UNTIL 1954 it was used for those purposes:

"In 1954, the research took a more aggressive turn, with scientists looking to cook up ways to inflict damage on Soviet livestock"

"President Clinton to include Plum Island in his expanded bioterrorism program based on the possibility of a biological attack on the nation's agricultural base. Last year the administration of the island's research facilities was transferred from USDA to the Department of Homeland Security.
"

Re:phhhewwww

[HeghmoH]

This is just ridiculous.

If you are lucky, then you can get one warhead to kill a city. It depends a lot on how large the warhead is and how large the city is, of course. According to http://www.world-gazetteer.com/st/statd.htm, the number of cities in the world of all sizes is roughly (I'm too lazy to go through and add all the numbers together, so this is an estimate) 50,000. At one point there were 50,000 total warheads in inventory, but there aren't now. This also ignores the fact that a nuclear strike on a city will not automatically kill everyone who lives there; lots and lots and lots of people will survive. Also, half of the population of the planet doesn't live in a city of any kind.

The above analysis also ignores the realities of any real nuclear war scenario. No matter who the countries involved are, they are not going to carefully target cities so as to eliminate the greatest amount of population possible. The primary targets in a nuclear war are the other guy's nuclear forces. This means missile fields, strategic air bases, missile submarine docks, possibly aircraft carriers. With the possible exception of docks, none of these are known for being located in populated areas. Secondary targets are the other guy's conventional forces. These are air, army, and navy bases of all kinds, radar stations, air defense installations, etc. Some of these are located in populated areas, some are not. Tertiary targets are the other guy's infrastructure: airports, rail yards, major commercial hubs, and so on. These are generally located in populated areas but the population is not the target. last, coming in at #4, is the other guy's population. If and when you get to this point, you have already lost, but the threat of taking out a hefty chunk of the other guy's population can be a good insurance policy against war, and of course the threat has to be real for it to work.

By the time you've had a good-sized nuclear exchange, you've destroyed a bunch of warheads before they were exploded (warheads in missiles, aircraft, and ships that were destroyed in the fighting before they could fire), and, from the point of view of wiping out humanity, wasted a lot more warheads on relatively unpopulated areas. A bunch of cities have died, either because they contained critical infrastructure or just because they were important collections of people, but large portions of the population of both sides remains alive. More of them will die from radiation poisoning (although many fewer than most people think), starvation due to destruction of transport or 'nuclear winter', or just plain civil disorder, but you'll still have a lot left. And this is just in the two countries who went at it and their assorted allies; in any conceivable war scenario, the majority of the world will simply sit it out and hope none of the shit falls on them.

Chemical weapons aren't much of a threat to the survival of the race. Chemical and nuclear weapons are essentially the same as far as killing people goes; they can both do a good job at it, but only if everybody is in the same place, and it's just not something that the militaries of the world are going to bother with. Not to mention that nobody is wasteful enough to load chemical weapons onto strategic delivery systems, so in any armageddon scenario, the chemical weapons simply don't come into play.

Now we come to biological weapons. This is the only wildcard, because they are self-replicating. However, germs that make good war weapons don't make good extermination weapons, In fact, germs don't really make good extermination weapons at all. Either they kill so fast that they burn out (black plague, ebola) or they kill so slowly that the victim still has time to live a fairly normal life and have kids before they die (AIDS). Biological weapons are useless for war unless they can kill quickly. This means that they simply cannot wipe out an entire population, because they will burn out. Especially in

Re:phhhewwww

[juhaz]

We have enough WMD to destroy the earth 1000 times over

We don't have anything even near to destroy it even once. You haven't got the slightest idea of sheer power it takes to destroy an Earth-sized planet.

that's PLENTY to wipe out 100% of life

So we have plenty of weapons to destroy every last life form on this planet ... (you at least know what 100% means, don't you?)

(not including cockroaches I guess..).

... but then we don't. Make up your mind, will ya?

Cockroaches, and other insects are alive if you haven't noticed, not only that but they make up a significant portion of that 100%.

Re:phhhewwww

[Short Circuit]

Uh, ebola can get absorbed through the skin. And it causes massive bleeding for anyone who's infected.

If you get a drop of ebola-tainted blood on your skin, you've as good as got the disease. There were serious issues with volunteer docters being infected during the ebola outbreaks in Africa.

Re:phhhewwww

[Anonymous Coward]

While I am not the poster of the parent to your post, here's the definition of decimate from dictionary.com:

1. To destroy or kill a large part of (a group).
2. Usage Problem.
1. To inflict great destruction or damage on: The fawns decimated my rose bushes.
2. To reduce markedly in amount: a profligate heir who decimated his trust fund.
3. To select by lot and kill one in every ten of.

Sounds like the correct usage to me.

Re:phhhewwww

[xenocyst]

"And as for the article, none of the pathogens that were mentioned, such as Ebola, Anthrax, or Hantavirus, are massively contagious."

You're joking I hope... Ebola is, depending on the strain, somewhere between very very deadly and completely disastrous. The worst strain is airborne via coughing and it has a 90% kill rate. That means that any urban or even suburban setting with an outbreak is completely fucked, in a matter of a couple days. Think of everyone you know, now pretend 9 of 10 are dead.
No big deal, right?

Re:phhhewwww

[JonTurner]

You're right. Let's disarm completely and all sing "We are the World" while holding hands in a field of flowers. Meanwhile, people with evil intentions will continue to plan for the first major bioweapon attack in a dense population center. When hundreds of millions are dying, at least you can claim with a clear conscious "at least we weren't building these bugs in our own labs." Some consolation.

>>Then we should only need exactly enough amount to deter those people.

You're changing the subject from one discussing the necessity of having a bioweapons research lab to one about disarmament in general. It's a troll, I realize, but I'll bite:
Unfortunately, I don't think that anything will deter the sort of people who strap bombs onto their bodies and blow themselves up on city busses full of women and children or fly airplanes into buildings full of innocents for the thrill of murder and the promised trip to heaven with seventy virgins, etc. That's evidence of madness of a grotesque magnitude; madness that cannot be conquored through negoiations. Would you disagree? If so, please provide historical evidence of such a success right here _____________________________________
Complete annihilation or crushing, overwhelming use of force is the only solution for purely evil cultures, but others in our time (including, most recently, the voters in Spain) have ignored history and believe such people can be negotiated with and appeased. That same mistake was made across Europe approximately seventy years ago with the result of tens of millions of deaths. How soon we all forget.]

Now, let's get back to the issue at hand. The necessity (or not) of having a bioweapon research lab. The past century is full of examples of people willing to kill themselves and/or their countryment so long as they also murder some number of their enemies. The purpose of these labs is to discover means of countering and controlling the effects of these weapons so as to minimize the threat these weapons pose and thus reduce the threat (and power) of terrorists and their supporting governments with these weapons.

We'd better be able to deal with the weapons, because we cannot reason with suicidal religious fanatics or cultures that believe that by killing children on a bus, one punches a ticket for an express trip to heaven. Biochems are merely one more tool for those who wish to exert power over others, and the labs are means for discovering ways to counter those weapons.

Re:phhhewwww

[s20451]

The worst strain is airborne via coughing and it has a 90% kill rate.

If that's true, it's about as communicable as SARS, though more deadly. I lived in Toronto through the SARS crisis and it affected me not at all.

Multiplying a death rate by a population is misleading, because people will change their behaviour to avoid people with the disease, up to and including barricading themselves in their homes. In the case of SARS, the disease was brought under control through large-scale preventive quarantines.

Now in the case of smallpox, all bets are off, because the virus itself is airborne, not carried in droplets. You only have to pass within a few meters of a sick person to get infected.

Re:phhhewwww

[Hard_Code]

Ok, I'll bite your rancid preemptive "counter-troll" to my 4 sentence post.

You're right. Let's disarm completely and all sing "We are the World" while holding hands in a field of flowers. Meanwhile, people with evil intentions will continue to plan for the first major bioweapon attack in a dense population center. When hundreds of millions are dying, at least you can claim with a clear conscious "at least we weren't building these bugs in our own labs." Some consolation.

I see, we will fight bioweapons with OTHER bioweapons. Because terrorists are deterred by us having bioweapons right? [1]

>>Then we should only need exactly enough amount to deter those people.

You're changing the subject from one discussing the necessity of having a bioweapons research lab to one about disarmament in general. It's a troll, I realize, but I'll bite:

Err, no. I'm responding to

"*That's* why weapons like this are needed. Because others have them, too."

The claim that we need weapons because others have them as if having them would deter those "others". While it is understandable that a certain amount of research into "weaponization" is necessary in researching cures and defenses, I withhold a healthy skepticism of such practice. But I thank you for fabricating wild extrapolations of my position.

Unfortunately, I don't think that anything will deter the sort of people who strap bombs onto their bodies and blow themselves up on city busses full of women and children or fly airplanes into buildings full of innocents for the thrill of murder and the promised trip to heaven with seventy virgins, etc.

[1]: 0h n0es. Yuo are in t3h agreement with me! HAX!

Seriously, you seem a bit insecure. Do you really have to prove your point to me that bad?

Re:phhhewwww

[DR SoB]

" I lived in Toronto through the SARS crisis and it affected me not at all."

I also live in Toronto, and the SARS crisis DID indeed affect you. Let's start at the economic level, then work back to the viral level. First off, SARS changed everyone perception of Toronto, it caused great hardship on our city, if that doesn't affect you, then you must not make a living. Secondly, how would you know if you had a mild case of SARS? Did you get tested? Are you aware that THOUSANDS of people showed residual SARS being secreted from there blood, even though they were documented cases because it couldn't be proven. The fact is many people believe SARS was a virus that was "too good" at killing people so it mutated to a less lethal form so it could continue undetected in the public.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/917434/ po sts

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNe ws /TPPrint/LAC/20030405/FCFLUU/Comment

http://www.sarsattacks.com/mutation.php

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/19/105582 84 40514.html

Statement from WHO:

The number of mutations is up," said Marie-Paule Kieny, head of the World Health Organisation's Initiative for Vaccine Research program.

"The virus evolves. We have to monitor its diversity and its potential evolution."

Re:phhhewwww

[s20451]

Agreed, but the point in the grandparent was that 90% of a city's population would be killed by ebola. I was using SARS as an example to point out that a similarly communicable disease only infected a tiny fraction of the population.

I don't dispute that thousands may have been exposed to SARS, but there are 4+ million people in the GTA. Those are pretty low odds.

Re:phhhewwww

[DR SoB]

Okay, in that case I completely agree with you. There's no way ebola could alone could have a 90% kill rate, but those cross bred virus such as Ebola/SmallPox, well, who knows what could happen. I'd imagine that the governments best weapons could climb to rates that would surprise us.

Nice website btw. I look forward to reading your thesis.

Re:phhhewwww

[tumbaumba]

The only thing we could even imagine doing to kill off everybody on the planet with current technology would be to find a very large Earth-crossing asteroid, and spend an enormous amount of time and money pushing it on to a collision course. Future technology may change things, but this is how it stands today.

So I can come out from my bunker then?

Re:phhhewwww

[Lord_Pall]

Actually to be fairly morbid, a more effective bioweapon has a long gestation period, long communicability period, and very long debilitating death cycle.

If you have thousands of patients tying up the medical infrastructure, you inflict multiple casualties per infection.
Additionally, you increase the chance of the medical professionals contracting the disease.

A quick death doesn't consume as many resources..

Re:phhhewwww

[shotfeel]

I'm not sure where the meaning went astray, but I hope everyone does understand the "90% kill rate" means 90% of the people who are infected will die. Kill rate has nothing to do with how easily the disease can be spread, which is what the GGP? was saying. AFAIK (I could be wrong) none of the pathogens are "massively contagious", as in becoming airborne and being transmitted through a building's ventilation system.

Re:phhhewwww

[shotfeel]

Cockroaches, and other insects are alive if you haven't noticed, not only that but they make up a significant portion of that 100%.

Only if you ignore one of the most abundant forms of life on the planet -plants :-)

Re:phhhewwww

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that maybe not everybody knows, but in the times of cold war at least half of all existing nuclear warheads both in the Russia and Western Europe were pointed on countries in Central Europe (Poland, Slovakia, Czech, Hungary, Bulgaria, etc...) Why? So, in case of an invasion from either of those sides those weapons would be fired and the firing countries 'safely' isolated...

Re:phhhewwww

[rhuntley12]

I'd mod you up but yeah I can't. Good reading though.

Not so bad?

[xanthines-R-yummy]

I don't work in a BSL4 lab (just measley BSL2), but I thought the dangers were pretty minimal. Everything should be done in airflow controlled cabinets that is THEN in a flow controlled room, while workers wear pressurized suits. If the power were to go off, why don't they just pack everything up in a box and toss it in the freezer? It should stay frozen for quite some time with the insulation.

Just sayin...

Re:Not so bad?

[TGK]

Because of the infection rates on some of those bugs. BSL4 is terrifying stuff, it's like working with plutonium that can breed.

If I remember correctly, to be a BSL4 pathogen a bug must have a high lethality in humans, unresponsive to treatment and vaccine, and a high infection rate.

Aids, for example, is BSL3 (or is it 2?). Now, HIV if frightening stuff, and while treatment has come a long way recently, its still the stuff of nightmares.

BSL4 is the stuff of the kind of nightmares you get after watching a Hannibal Lecter marathon while dropping acid.

Personaly I'd be much happier of BSL4 labs had some sort of fail safe, such that if all proverbial hell broke loose the doors would just shut and seal, and if everyone inside died horribly, well... so be it.

Re:Not so bad?

[Fnkmaster]

Yeah, just pack it up and throw it in the freezer (which has no power either).... uhh... that really sounds like a massively inadequate response to me for a facility with the kinds of devastating failure modes possible for such a place. I mean, air pressure differentials, freezers, all that crap depends on being on multiple semi-separated power grids and having serious backup power systems in place capable of supplying at least 5-6 days worth of emergency power if not more without any human intervention. Hell, it shouldn't even rely on a human to flip the system over to backup power, that should be a manual failsafe required only in the event that the automated switchover fails.

If your average server colo facility (the major places I've been at do this at least, like the old Exodus data center in Waltham) can auto-failover to backup power in under a second, and can test their backup power systems on a monthly basis, why on God's green earth can't a place like this do AT LEAST the same?

Re:Not so bad?

[DigiShaman]

I don't recall the orginal source. But I do remember hearing about the common cold being a BSL4 pathogen due to it's high rate of infection and mutation.

Re:Not so bad?

[VendingMenace]

AIDS is a BL2. It SHOULD be a BL 3 (no cure, but can be treated). However, for logistical reasons it is a BL2. Otherwise (if it was BL3, then blood drives would have to be done in a BL3 facility, all research on donated blook would have to be done in a BL3 facility, ect. At least until you checked to see if it contained HIV.

At least that is what i was told when i worked with human blood. It is balisically a logistic thing, owing to the fact that AIDS is fairly prevelent.

Re:Not so bad?

[Hiro Antagonist]

IIRC, BL3 is usually reserved for diseases that are moderately contagious, albeit only treatable (not curable). AIDS is minimally contagious, though; you can only get it through transferrence of blood or semen.

Re:Not so bad?

[LauraScudder]

As quoted here:

BIOSAFETY LEVEL 4 is required for work with dangerous and exotic agents which pose a high individual risk of aerosol-transmitted laboratory infections and life-threatening disease.

So I have the feeling the common cold doesn't live up to the life-threatening disease requirement. BSL4 is for things like Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers with no vaccine. I think smallpox is also studied under these conditions due to the fact that the general population has never been vaccinated.

Re:Not so bad?

[rbrinkman]

you forgot the bit about that Biosafety level 4 pathogens may be transmitted by the *cough* aerosol *cough* route. Within work areas of the facility, all activities are confined to Class III biological safety cabinets, or Class II biological safety cabinets used with one-piece positive pressure personnel suits ventilated by a life support system. The Biosafety Level 4 laboratory has special engineering and design features to prevent microorganisms from being disseminated into the environment. (Except power outages followed by sabotage of the generator apparently). Remember these are the nice things like Viral Hemorragic Fevers (the Ebolas of the world http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/spb/mnpages/dispage s/vhf.htm) BSL1 - Biosafety Level 1; Organisms not known to cause disease in health adult humans. However, these agents may be opportunistic and cause disease in the young, aged, immunodeficient or immunosuppressed individuals. BSL2 - Biosafety Level 2; Laboratory transmission occurs by self-inoculation or exposure via mucous membranes. Human blood, body fluids and cell lines are designated as Biosafety Level 2, unless they are known to contain a higher level pathogen. BSL2 organisms may cause diseases that may be lethal over time such as HIV. However, the BMBL lists BL2 organisms as being of moderate risk to personnel and the environment. BSL3 - Biosafety Level 3 have the potential for respiratory transmission (inhalation of aerosols). BSL3 organisms may cause serious and potentially lethal infection. BSL4 - Biosafety Level 4 is assigned to work involving dangerous or exotic agents which pose a high individual risk of life-threatening disease, which may be transmitted via the aerosol route, and for which there is no available vaccine or therapy More info at http://www.cdc.gov/od/ohs/biosfty/bmbl4/bmbl4s3.ht m

Re:Not so bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personaly I'd be much happier of BSL4 labs had some sort of fail safe, such that if all proverbial hell broke loose the doors would just shut and seal, and if everyone inside died horribly, well... so be it.

*Cough* "The Andromeda Strain" *Cough*

Re:Not so bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

They do have a backup plan

It's called a Minuteman III

Re:Not so bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it would work better if they just placed a small nuke under the building. To get permission to launch a nuke at a domestic target, well, it would have been to late because it would have spread. Now, to have a research facility be destroyed because of an on site gas explosion though... Is an acceptable possiblity.

Re:Not so bad?

[gregorsamsa11]

Speaking of fail-safes, why don't they have an uninterruptable power supply? You'd think that would be required for BSL-4 facilities.

Re:Not so bad?

[coastwalker]

I find it interesting that in general people do not have the same fear of pathogens that they have for radioactivity. We agonise about chucking truckloads of radioactive waste several kilometers underground but biohazard is an unheard word. Considering that a pinhead of plutonium ground up fine enough could kill a small village and a pinhead of the wrong bug could kill 90% of humanity it seems a little odd. We must have a great deal of faith that someone somewhere isnt trying to load Ebola into a common cold virus.

Meanwhile there are plenty of natural biohazards to research and control. If you think Foot and Mouth disease couldnt happen in the States then you are probably wrong. Huge numbers of farm animals in the UK were slaughtered and burnt because of this disease as recently as 2001.
http://www.defra.gov.uk/footandmouth/
The final toll was 582,000 cattle, 3,487,000 sheep, 146,000 pigs, 3,000 goats, 1,000 deer, 1,000 other animals

It is particularly worrying that the entire outbreak was thought to have ocurred because illegaly imported meat from a far eastern source was fed to pigs on one farm. Vaccination is a strategy which will be used at the next outbreak and is expected to prevent a similar catastrophy.

So it is very worrying that this facility broke down. Particularly as the kind of work done there is absolutely necessary to defend against bio terrorism. All it would take one assumes to cause a foot and mouth epedemic would be a suitcase full of infected meat thrown over the wall of a pig farm.

Re:Not so bad?

[DerekLyons]

If your average server colo facility (the major places I've been at do this at least, like the old Exodus data center in Waltham) can auto-failover to backup power in under a second, and can test their backup power systems on a monthly basis, why on God's green earth can't a place like this do AT LEAST the same?

Your average colo wouldn't fare any better after the guys responsible for maintaining, testing, and operating all those backup and supporting systems had been on strike for months, and the personell actually on-site were not familiar with the system.

Re:Not so bad?

[RedSynapse]

Ebola Zaire is passed only through direct transmission, not via airborne transmission, yet it is still classified as BSL-4. So while BSL-4 *may* be airborne it's not necessarily so.

Sounds Familiar

[bfg9000]

Plum Island is home to a Bio-Safety Level 4 (BSL-4) research facility... a three-hour power outage... the air filtration systems are inoperable.. decontamination procedures break down... the seals in the pressurized airlock doors start to deflate... workers were desperately sealing the doors with duct tape...

Plum Island, Raccoon City... either way, I'm duct taping my windows and kneeling under my desk as per the Umbrella Group's safety instructions.

Backup Power

[turgid]

So where are the emergency batteries and diesel generators? How can you get away with that in this day and age?

Re:Backup Power

[ajlitt]

RTFA. The workers that managed critical systems like... oh... THE GENERATORS went on strike and were replaced by unskilled and untrained dimwits.

Re:Backup Power

[JabberWokky]

So why can't people read the article? How can you get away with that in this day and age?

--
Evan

Re:Backup Power

[Pig Hogger]

So why can't people read the article? How can you get away with that in this day and age?

You're new around here? (not, judging from your ID#)

Or it could be a new stupidity virus that escaped from that lab...

Re:Backup Power

[turgid]

This is slashdot. No one RsTFA. I just needed a bit more karma.

Re:Backup Power

[Anonymous Coward]

Im new here. Why do you need a bit more karma.

Re:Backup Power

[turgid]

Im new here. Why do you need a bit more karma.

You see, when you have lots of karma, your posts get scored +2 by default. That means you get to shout louder than everyone else, so to speak. In this manner I can impose my views upon the general populace and bring about my evil plan for world domination though planting my subversive ideas in peoples' minds. It also helps me feel less insecure to have lots of strangers agree with my petty-minded drivellings. In the Land of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king, so they say.

Muhahahahahahahahahahahahah!

lets hope that

[Jotaigna]

Lex luthor doesnt find out about this, otherwise some people will be doomed to live in Ottisburg.

What are the moral implications of a Nation that invades another because they suspect there are weapons of mass destruction, and they have such a stash in their own garage?, i personally think is so inconsecuent. Plus,if found, the WOMD in Iraq are wrapped in duct tape, that would be all over the news as the worst practice for this kind of equippment and only scumbags like Saddam's thugs are bad enough to do that!.

Re:lets hope that

[Planesdragon]

What are the moral implications of a Nation that invades another because they suspect there are weapons of mass destruction, and they have such a stash in their own garage?

We didn't just invade Iraq because of that. (Look--we didn't invade Pakistan or India, nor have we invaded North Korea, or the UK, or France.)

Re:lets hope that

[Tofino]

The difference being, of course, that the likelihood that these diseases are being studied in the US labs for preventative purposes is extremely high, whereas the likelihood of the same in 3rd world labs is extremely low.

Re:lets hope that

[ninejaguar]

We didn't just invade Iraq because of that.

Oh. Then why did we?

= 9J =

Re:lets hope that

[fozzmeister]

No the US just had a score to settle (and according to Micheal Moore, a pipeline to build)

Re:lets hope that

[Planesdragon]

Oh. Then why did we?

Whole buncha reasons.

* Violation of 1991 cease fire
* Attempt to assassinate Bush Sr.
* Giving aid and comfort to terrorists
* Refusing to cooperate with the UN.
* Being a rat-bastard tyrant
* Simple failture of Washington/Baghdad diplomacy

(Oh, and I noticed a typo. It should have been "We didn't invade Iraq just because of that." 'they're trying to get nukes' is certainly on the list of "also-reasons". My apologies.)

Re:lets hope that

[ninejaguar]

* Violation of 1991 cease fire

That agreement was with the U.N. Are we the U.N.?

Attempt to assassinate Bush Sr.

Was that a response to us attempting to assassinate Saddam? Or, Kaddafi, or Castro, or [insert long list of U.S. successful and unsuccessful attempts to assassinate foreign leaders from South America to Asia]?

Giving aid and comfort to terrorists

Who? The U.S.? If it were that, then why not invade North Korea, or Iran, or Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia...etc? The answer is below.

Refusing to cooperate with the UN.

Again, are we the U.N.?

Being a rat-bastard tyrant

Finally, the honest answer. But, only partially honest. His daddy was made a fool by Saddam, and everyone knew that if Shrub got into office, the Iraqis would pay. Shrub's Secretary of the Treasury reports that plans for invading Iraq were in the making only within a few days of Shrub's theft of the election. If it were simply a matter of being a rat-bastard, there are plenty of others further along the road to bastard-hood: North Korea's loony leader for one. The problem is, no oil there, so no business drive to get there. Afghanistan proved a perfect, inarguable cause. Not for the one you think. True, Bin-Loonie was there, but that was simply the inescapable argument for invasion. If we could tame that country (only an asteroid dropped from space could achieve that), we could finally lay that oil pipeline we've been planning on for the past 30 years. Unfortunately, CNN and FauxNews channels don't cover this little bit of history, but we've been in a chess game with the Russians and Chinese for this bit of inhospitable land for quite a while. By the way, this is also why we're "friends" with Pakistan.

Simple failture of Washington/Baghdad diplomacy

No. Simple failure of Shrub Administration/U.N. diplomacy. His daddy was better at it, but this numbskull couldn't control his trigger finger. His only half-way feasable argument (even Powell had to excise some of the outright lies from the deceptive rhetoric he was forced to spew to the U.N.'s collective face) of Weapons of Mass Destruction have vanished into thin air, leaving a unpleasant odor that the rest of the world blames us for.

'they're trying to get nukes'

Again, why not invade Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, or Pakistan? They're the biggest terrorist threats outside of Afghanistan. They've been attempting to get nuclear long before Iraq, and have actual terrorist ties. The reason is this was a personal vendetta and business agenda, and he used to this country to fulfill it. If he should force Iraq's oil wells within U.S. corporate controls in the process of taking revenge, all the better. This monkey has to go come November.

You're right in that Shrub didn't attack Iraq simply for Weapons of Mass Destruction. That's just what he used to sell it.

The truth is, the rest of the world was behind us going into Afghanistan because that's where t

Re:lets hope that

[Planesdragon]

That agreement was with the U.N. Are we the U.N.?

It was also with us. And the UN didn't even try a "no, don't bomb Iraq US" vote.

As for the rest of your critizisms: just because you don't agree with a reason doesn't make it dishonest. It might make it "wrong", but hardly not "honest."

No. Simple failure of Shrub Administration/U.N. diplomacy. His daddy was better at it, but this numbskull couldn't control his trigger finger. His only half-way feasable argument (even Powell had to excise some of the outright lies from the deceptive rhetoric he was forced to spew to the U.N.'s collective face) of Weapons of Mass Destruction have vanished into thin air, leaving a unpleasant odor that the rest of the world blames us for.

*sigh*

Rank-and-file Iraqi troops were convinced that, while their unit didn't have WMD, some more-secret unit of the Iraqi army did. According to some reports, Saddam himself thought that he had WMD before the war. And regardless of what he knew, the former Butcher of Baghdad certainly didn't act like a man with nothing to hide.

Again, why not invade Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, or Pakistan?

Because all of those nations are engaging in active and productive diplomacy with us. War is the breakdown of diplomacy, not a hammer for every problem.

They've been attempting to get nuclear long before Iraq, and have actual terrorist ties.

What part of paying pensions to the familiy of suicide bombers and having an "Army of Israel" founded to make terrorist strikes against Israel isn't "actual terrorist ties?" (You know, the army that the US is actually fighting in Iraq?)

You're right in that Shrub didn't attack Iraq simply for Weapons of Mass Destruction. That's just what he used to sell it.

And I'm pissed at him because of that, because he had enough to go to war without nukes.

The rest of the planet can distinguish between a "global war against terrorism", and personal vendettas/business goals.

No, they just think they can. Sure, they can spot a Republican mixing priorities, but they just miss the point on a whole host of other bits that don't have anything to do with America.

Re:lets hope that

[ninejaguar]

It was also with us.

And, where did you get that?

And the UN didn't even try a "no, don't bomb Iraq US" vote.

I think you mean the Security Council. And, where would that have gotten them, another flagrant disregard of international law from the U.S.? What would publicizing another violation from us get them? They certainly weren't going to attack us militarily on it like we were about to attack Iraq.

As for the rest of your critizisms: just because you don't agree with a reason doesn't make it dishonest. It might make it "wrong", but hardly not "honest."

Um, it's dishonest when it is meant to knowingly mislead. Not that I don't think that you believe the points you made were the reasons for our invasion. But, the Shrub administration and Faux News channel used these arguments to sway public opinion while all the time knowing these were not the real reasons. It is Shrub and Faux who were dishonest, not you for simply stating what they claimed. And, their biggest reason for invasion, Weapons of Mass Destruction (which ran on the news day and night and day and night and day...), had not been verified, only conjectured. The terrible result is that contemporary Iraq does have religious terrorists. We invited them there by removing the only remotely secular government in the Islamic region that was as evil as they were, and then providing them an unresistable opportunity to kill us as foreign invaders. So, yes, terrorists have now been reportedly flocking to Iraq in droves.

Rank-and-file Iraqi troops were convinced that, while their unit didn't have WMD, some more-secret unit of the Iraqi army did.

If we are to start fighting wars based on opinions, in spite of facts, then I feel sorry for any country that is not in line with our opinion. I also feel sorry for us should such a country feel desperately paranoid enough to treat us as we've preemptively treated others. In attacking, invading, and occupying a sovereign foreign country on unsubstantiated opinions, we've violated international law and our own constitution. Now that we've violated international law that we helped create, we are at worst criminals and best practicioners of vigilantism and at least hypocrites. What punishment should we expect? Or, is it that only other countries can behave criminally, and that we don't have to follow the rules we expect others to?

According to some reports, Saddam himself thought that he had WMD before the war.

Psychics notwithstanding, how would anyone know what he thought? Let's leave Dione Warwick out of this.

And regardless of what he knew, the former Butcher of Baghdad certainly didn't act like a man with nothing to hide.

It's called international poker where world leaders try to gain every inch they can from other world leaders. A game he lost, as he didn't realize that we're crazier than we look. There's no excuse for Saddam's behavior towards his own people, and to a lesser extent towards the international community (we're in violation of quite a few international laws ourselves). His failure was to note that while Bush I was a sane and intelligent individual, that Bush II The Unelected barely graduated out of a university that under normal circumstances wouldn't have dreamt of letting him attend in the first place.

Because all of those nations are engaging in active and productive diplomacy with us.

You mean when N.Korea kicked nuclear inspectors out after our invasion of Iraq and now have a few nuclear warheads (you remember N.Korea, they sell missiles to disgruntled countries)? Or, perhaps Iran's declaration that they will be pursuing a nuclear program once they realized the U.S. can drop in on them anytime they want to. Or, how about Saudi

Re:lets hope that

[Planesdragon]

And, where did you get that?

Let me think for a minute--

Oh, I know. We're on the friggin' security council?

I think you mean the Security Council. And, where would that have gotten them, another flagrant disregard of international law from the U.S.? What would publicizing another violation from us get them? They certainly weren't going to attack us militarily on it like we were about to attack Iraq.

*sigh*

Look, since you've obviously got a hell of a lot of energy, why don't you find a legitimate legal authority that actually considers the recent invasion of Iraq as a contravention of international law?

The US has gone to war without the UN's approval before. The mere lack of UN approval does not make a war a violation of the UN charter.

A proposed UN Security Council resolution to hold off US hostilites, even if vetoed, would have shifted the legal, ethical, and political weight. But no one put such a resolution forth, not simply because Shrub would ignore it, but because the US did have plenty of legitimate reasons to invade Iraq.

. Not that I don't think that you believe the points you made were the reasons for our invasion. But, the Shrub administration and Faux News channel used these arguments to sway public opinion while all the time knowing these were not the real reasons.

*sigh* (again)

No. Bush's press harped on the one nuclear reason, which really was the only one that could have carried the war by itself if it had been true. I didn't learn of a single other reason from the war from watching the Fox news channel, and I was only reminded of a few by the President's staff's PR.

But that doesn't matter here, because you're not engaging in a reasonable discussion. You're resorting to childish name-calling and what is really unsupportable allegations of criminal malice on the part of the President.

If you really want Bush gone, doing an impersonation of a Kennedy-assassination nut won't help it happen. Just as there were legitimate reasons for war, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to elect someone other than Bush.

Al-Qaeda + Saddam was the terrorism that Shrub was telling everybody.

Got a quote? I mean, honestly, this is on the level of "Al Gore invented the internet" for misquoting an executive officeholder.

Saddam DID support terrorists. So he was at least tangental to the War on Terrorism. And more to the point, he's a malicious, vile tyrant who didn't even feed his own people.

Screw morality, screw oil, and screw religion--a world leader being so bad to their own people should be an act of war against the international community in today's world, and worthy of a military response. It @#$ing was good enough to hang Nazis and go to war in Yugoslavia, so it was good enough for Saddam--and, if anyone forgets it, it should be good enough for tyrants in any other nation.

Other than the war-mongering of frustrated American masculinity, what did we have?

Moral outrage, indisputable evil, and the willingness to step on toes and offend people to eliminate a bad man.

Bush is a Christian. Not just any Christian, but a "born again" christian. When he saw Saddam Hussein, he didn't see an Arab, or a political opponent, or even the guy who tried to kill his father. He saw an Evil Man who should be stopped--and, as a Good Christian, Bush was of the opinion even before he was elected that he would stop Saddam if he got a chance.

THIS is the great, mysterious reason that you're alluding to. And Bush was right, even if only this one time.

From your argument, two wrongs make a right. History tells us that's a good recipe for a blood fued.

Or progress. Find a time of peace, and I'll point you to the time of war that made it happen. Historically, people do NOT simply become peaceful--they live in peace once those who cannot live in peace are violently excised.

Now, all that said: Bush did what he wanted to do, and he created a hell of a lot of problems along with it. If we can find someone who won't make things worse, we should replace Bush as President--and we won't do it by juvenile name-calling.

Re:lets hope that

[ninejaguar]

Oh, I know. We're on the friggin' security council?

And, what does the U.S. being on the Security Council have to do with the U.N.'s resolution 687 being violated by Iraq?

As the resolution by the U.N. was for Iraq to follow, any violation was a matter for the U.N. Again, are we the U.N.? If we're so wound up about Iraq not following the U.N.'s resolution, why do we violate U.N. laws in attacking another country? The answer is simple, and the world knows it even if most of us Americans don't want to say the word: hypocrisy. Frankly, we've proven by a simple act of impatience that we don't wish to practice what we preach.

...why don't you find a legitimate legal authority that actually considers the recent invasion of Iraq as a contravention of international law?

No problem. You only need to first provide me with a method of proving the legitimacy of legality and authority other than with the strength of arms. Short of that, you'll have to simply settle for this.

The US has gone to war without the UN's approval before. The mere lack of UN approval does not make a war a violation of the UN charter.

Ah, now I see where the difference in opinion stems from. I was getting curious where you were getting your legal standing from. In this reality, not the simplistic Cowboys and Indians fantasy world Shrub appears to operate in, you're quite wrong. In reality, it actually is in violation of the U.N. charter to attack a country that isn't attacking you. By design, it is also against our own Constitution. That Constitution certainly is a bothersome document isn't it?

...because the US did have plenty of legitimate reasons to invade Iraq.

So says the U.S., but not the U.N. One more visible flouting of U.N. rules by the U.S. would've brought up the question of why the U.N. doesn't enforce it's laws against rogue acts such as that about to be perpetrated by one of its members. To compound the difficulty, what if those countries were two of the founding members (U.S. + U.K.)? What could they do, confront them directly in a military showdown? Not going to happen. Rather than protect a nation that was in violation of their resolution, they let one of their members tear that nation apart in appeasement, furthering their own slide towards irrelevancy.

*sigh* (again)

Shortness of breath can be associated with heart disease. Consider a checkup.

Bush's press harped on the one nuclear reason, which really was the only one that could have carried the war by itself if it had been true.

Despite the U.N.'s inspectors' protest that there was no evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction as stated by the U.S., the impatient Shrub couldn't resist the opportunities presented. Chief U.N. Weapons Inspector Blix was unwarrantably maligned by the Shrub administration, and the rest of the world remembers it even if we Americans don't.

you're not engaging in a reasonable discussion. You're resorting to childish name-calling...

Not agreeing with you doesn't warrant accusations of not engaging in reasonable discussion. Don't make the mistake of equating reasonableness with acquiescence. I at least try to provide reference for the arguments I make, whereas you haven't.

...and what is really unsupportable allegations of criminal malice on the part of the President.

Aside from his previous arrests, flagrant violation of International and U.S. Constitutional law is a criminal act. Not mere allegation, but now a fact in world and U.S. history.

Kennedy-assassination nut

Is this a new game?

[dnoyeb]

Sounds like the opening diaster of a video game. I saw the movie Resident Evil this weekend for the first time, and this sounds so familiar.

Redundant power supply

[Underholdning]

We host some servers. If they do not have power, the customers goes apeshit (and I blame the guy that doesn't speak english). That's it. No one has died (yet). Still, we have two seperate diesel power generators in underground concrete shelters. Why is it that a small hosting company has more power supply redundancy than a level 4 biological lab?

Re:Redundant power supply

[drinkypoo]

You don't, the lab has three backup generators, which were not running for unexplained reasons.

Re:Redundant power supply

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't, the lab has three backup generators, which were not running for unexplained reasons

They don't count if they can't keep them maintained and in working condition.

"Hey guys, I got this UPS.. sure it doesn't have any batteries, but that means we have protection against power outagages than company Y!"

Re:Redundant power supply

[Dun Malg]

You don't, the lab has three backup generators, which were not running for unexplained reasons.

Only slightly unexplained, I'd say. Maintenance engineers go on strike and suddenly all three generators don't work? The striking engineers blame it on "bad maintenance" by scab workers, but it's quite difficult to accidentally disable a generator, much less three of them. They don't really require any maintenance, other than checking fuel levels and starting them up once a month. Anything beyond that is handled by contracted outside maintenance companies that specialize in generators and backup power systems. I smell sabotage by a filthy union bastard.

Re:Redundant power supply

[Detritus]

The striking engineers blame it on "bad maintenance" by scab workers, but it's quite difficult to accidentally disable a generator, much less three of them.

Never underestimate the destructive potential of an incompetent maintenance engineer.

What's that dent in the wall of the power house? That's from a piston that made a sudden bid for freedom after the diesel generator was overhauled.

Re:Redundant power supply

[StateOfTheUnion]

You have working diesel power generators because you have screaming customers demanding uptime . . . Articles like this are important because if we dont know that the triple redundant generators at Plum Island are not being maintained (because of scabs, bad maint., poor security, or whatever), then we as citizens dont know that we too should be going "apeshit."

Re:Redundant power supply

[Spikerz]

This is why I hate unions. They were necessary at one time, but now are completely useless and end up holding people hostage with their demands. Anyone remember the scare of NYC subway/train/bus workers striking? Or when the LA ship yard workers went on strike and nothing could arrive like food/clothes/cars.
So they put hundreds of lives at risk with this magic generator failure all because they want their pay jacked up higher than a senior unix admin.
Hell the train ticket punchers make more than most admins.

Re:Redundant power supply

[Anonymous Coward]

"a filthy union bastard."

You made a good point. Too bad you made yourself sound like a total ass at the end with that comment. Then again I guess your not old enough to understand why all Unions aren't evil.

Re:Redundant power supply

[Dun Malg]

"a filthy union bastard."

You made a good point. Too bad you made yourself sound like a total ass at the end with that comment. Then again I guess your not old enough to understand why all Unions aren't evil.

Didn't say all unions are evil. I've been a dues paying member of the IBEW (electrician) and the CWA (telecom tech). I know what aspects of unionization are good and which are bad. In this case, I'm referring to a specific type of union person. Anyone who's ever worked in a union building trade knows this type of union person. He's the guy who works half as hard as everyone else and complains that he doesn't get paid enough. He's the guy who shows up to work high as a kite or drunk as a skunk, but he'll always make more than you and get laid off after you because he has seniority. He's the [cousin/brother/friend] of the president of the Local who somehow always gets named foreman despite his incompetence. He's the guy incharge of apprenticeship at the Local who decides that they're only going to accept eight apprentices a year (despite the extreme shortage of union electricians in the area), and fills those eight positions with slackjaw [children/nephews/friend's kids] of his good ol' buddies in the union, rather than the competent unindentured guys with twenty recommendations from journeyman they've worked under. He's the guy who sees his employer as an enemy that needs to be cheated and exploited because "they're rich and they owe me". He's the guy who thinks sabotage is a reasonable tactic for encouraging employer concessions at the bargaining table. I got nothing against non-filthy, non-bastard union members. I just hate the guys who see the union as some sort of free ride/meal card. Those guys are filthy union bastards.

Re:Redundant power supply

[Dun Malg]

Never underestimate the destructive potential of an incompetent maintenance engineer.

Heh. Good point. I've seen a building engineer replace a 30A fuse on one leg of a 277V panel with a cut off length of metal conduit because he ran out of fuses (they were blowing every couple days). When we saw that and asked him what his freakin' damage was, he said "well, I figured it would be OK for a little while until you guys got here". Fortunately for him it was a short in the AC chiller unit and it was early in the morning and not hot yet.

Re:Redundant power supply

[dattaway]

Large generators require constant maintenance. There are many points of failure. Batteries may be a bank of nicads, which last 10 years, or a bank of lead acid, good for 3. Diesel fuel is easily contaminated by water over the years and can cause blockage or leaks in the tanks and line. The large shafts from the engine to generator can break. Valves can pop out of the head. They often use turbos to maximize use. And these failures happened to a backup generator. The backup backup generator often had problems as well.

Any facility using heavy equipment needs an in house staff of experienced maintenance workers with that equipment. Hiring outside contractors or warranty service guys are always an interesting experience.

Re:Redundant power supply

[Dun Malg]

Large generators require constant maintenance. There are many points of failure. Batteries may be a bank of nicads, which last 10 years, or a bank of lead acid, good for 3. Diesel fuel is easily contaminated by water over the years and can cause blockage or leaks in the tanks and line. The large shafts from the engine to generator can break. Valves can pop out of the head. They often use turbos to maximize use. And these failures happened to a backup generator. The backup backup generator often had problems as well.

All good points, but they had all three generators go down after only five months. Before that, the engineers who're on strike were still working. But maybe water leaked into the fuel tankbecause of poor drainage system maintenance. Yeah, it's hard to say.

Re:Redundant power supply

[quinkin]

My grandfather worked in one of the old generator plants that supplied Sydney with power. These are dozens of generators, the size of large houses.

He needed a spanner or somesuch and cruised down to the other end of the plant to get one. At that exact point the generator they had been looking at "vaporised" (his word). The two other workers where never found.

Kinda offtopic, but it spun me out when he told me about it... that's a lot of energy...

Q.

Project Scoop

[thrill12]

I guess they should have gotten a nuclear device as in Andromeda Strain which practically covers about any mistake you can make at such a facility.
(Except ofcourse if the organism thrives on that)

Re:Project Scoop

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, yea,, that was a -good- book :)

Re:Project Scoop

[Anonymous Coward]

*Pa looks out window, sees huge mushroom cloud*

Pa: Hey Ma! Get them young'uns down t' th' fallout shelter! Hurry!

Ma: What'sa matter Pa?

Pa: Either th' Ruskies done got mad or them eggheads out t' Plum Island done got stupid.

REsident Evil

[DarthTeufel]

Resident Evil : New York City. The new reality based TV show from Fox will follow 12 mutants around as they infect our nation with a virus that was created to destroy only Al Quada operatives. Unfortunately, a beta version of the drug got released, and we got a hit series. Who will be transformed first? Will it be the janitor or perhaps the comic relief ex rapper who always gets killed. Tune in and watch.

What are you worried about?

[burgburgburg]

It's not like it was a Level 5 research facility which would be one worse than a Level 4 research facil ...what do you mean the numbering stops at 4? There is no such thing as a Level 5 research facility? Oh, that's different. In that case, I think we should panic right about now.

Re:What are you worried about?

[meringuoid]

It's not like it was a Level 5 research facility which would be one worse than a Level 4 research facil ...what do you mean the numbering stops at 4?

Is this the Spinal Tap approach to biohazard classification?

Re:What are you worried about?

[afidel]

Acutually, it is the only BSL5 facility in the U.S. At least according to the last two directors:

Officially listed as a Level 3 facility, I have deteremined that Plum Island is, in reality, a Biocontainment Level 5 Facility...the only known such facility in the U.S. According to documents that I have obtained from the 1998 USAHA (United States Animal Health Association) website, Dr. Mike Kiley, and also the previous Director (until July 1999) Dr. Alfonso Torres, *both* refer to Plum Island as the "only Biocontainment Level 5 Facility in the U.S."
link

Re:What are you worried about?

[DiscoDave_25]

Nope... It would have to go all up to 11.

Re:What are you worried about?

[coastwalker]

Sorry cant resist this...

"Nigel: ...the numbers all go to eleven. Look...right across the
board.
Marty: Ahh...oh, I see....
Nigel: Eleven...eleven...eleven....
Marty: ..and most of these amps go up to ten....
Nigel: Exactly.
Marty: Does that mean it's...louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see,
most...most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten.
You're on ten here...all the way up...all the way up....
Marty: Yeah....
Nigel: ...all the way up. You're on ten on your guitar...where
can you go from there? Where?
Marty: I don't know....
Nigel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is if we need that extra..
push over the cliff...you know what we do?
Marty: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Marty: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the
top... number... and make that a little louder?

Nigel: These go to eleven".

credit to http://www.spinaltapfan.com/

The Cobra Event

[DR SoB]

I recently read a book named "The Cobra Event" by Richard Preston. It was one of the best book's I've ever read, it was about germ warfare, and most of it was based around real technology (such as Viral Glass). I won't say anymore, so I don't ruin the book, but I strongly recommend it.

No this is not off-topic. The last few chapters of the book, all take place on Plum Island, and they talk in detail about the facilities on this island. Great reading, and it made it better after I read this article.

Amazon link:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/034540997 3/ qid=1079625306/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/002-0266613-02360 18

Re:The Cobra Event

[qeveren]

What the heck is 'Viral Glass'? Upper-class dining-ware made from crystalized viral protein or something?

Re:The Cobra Event

[nycsubway]

That is a great book. Richard Preston also wrote "Demon in the Freezer". Robin Cook also writes some good books.

Re:The Cobra Event

[iamsure]

"most of it was based around real technology (such as Viral Glass)"

Viral Glass is *not* real technology. Perhaps you should get out more..

Re:The Cobra Event

[jdunn14]

While your listing Preston's work don't forget "The Hot Zone" Also an excellent book. From other authors there's also "The Coming Plague" by Laurie Garrett (factual, if a little slow) and "Virus X" by Frank M.D. Ryan. Personally I really enjoyed "Virus X" especially since it used a little less dramatic license than Preston's (very entertaining) work. For those of you who like the large creepy-crawlies try "Parasite Rex : Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures" by Carl Zimmer. Excellent book with fun facts about some very nasty parasites (bot flies, black river flies, mosquitos, guinnea worms, etc). Don't worry, that feeling of something crawling over your skin while reading is just psychosomatic.

Re:The Cobra Event

[DR SoB]

I posted that since I knew it would get a rise out of some people.. Here:

"
b) Detection of botulism:

We have been developing a generalized optical testing system for

adenosine triphosphate using the luciferase enzyme encapsulated in a sol

gel glass matrix. This makes a solid state sensor rather than a wet

chemical sensor. These techniques could be applied to other agents to

make faster more automated sensing.

"

Hmmmm? Gel Glass matrix? Sounds odd, I wonder who's doing research with GLASS and VIRAL infections? Read on:

http://lina.tns.sunysb.edu/AlfredCeramicsDetails .h tm

Here's WSU's view on Viral Glass, they seem to think it's real:

"A realistic view of the botox situation is that many of the problems of dispersal were likely solved by the >3,000 US scientists that reportedly worked on biological warfare during W.W. II & the cold war. It is also reasonable to assume that the botox can be fused by common molecular biology technology with other proteins that stabilize it for dispersal without decreasing its lethality or it can be mixed with other protective agents (e.g. trehalose, viral-glass) or that it can be encapsulated in protective material (timed release) that dissolves once it is in the digestive system. It should also be possible to clone the botox gene into common bacteria that inhabit the human gut (e.g. E. coli), which would establish themselves there long enough to produce a quantity of botox sufficient to disable the victim before their immune system responded; a natural condition seen in young babies who ingest the spores in foods like honey. For a chilling description of how this might be done visit the Cal Poly site."

http://www.slic2.wsu.edu:82/hurlbert/micro101/pa ge s/101biologicalweapons.html

Perhaps I should read less and get out more, your right... Then again, perhaps you should read more.

Re:The Cobra Event

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell did this post get flamebait?

Re:The Cobra Event

[DR SoB]

That's exactly what I was thinking. Some Slashdot mod went around and modded all my posts today to either flamebait or troll.. I think I've pissed someone on staff off somehow. Any comments mods??

Re:The Cobra Event

[Anonymous Coward]

The last few chapters of the book, all take place on Plum Island, and they talk in detail about the facilities on this island.

It's a work of FICTION. If it talks in detail about anything, the author is likely *making it up.* That's what a work of FICTION is.

Throw in a few tangential facts here and there, and make up a heinous, insidious, and disasterous plot linking them. Just like the article.

Re:The Cobra Event

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you need to read the book. The front inside cover has a statement :

"Althought this is a work of fiction, all technologies in this book are either real or in development stages"

Yes, the plot is fake, but the technology regarding bio-weapons that is talked about in the book is real.

Re:The Cobra Event

[metlin]

If you are being mod-bombed, the best thing to do is mail Jamie or one of the Slashdot crew.

They'll usually find the mod-bomber and undo all the damage :)

This has happened to me too, and it sucks.

Re:The Cobra Event

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you need to read the book. The front inside cover has a statement : "Althought this is a work of fiction, all technologies in this book are either real or in development stages" Yes, the plot is fake, but the technology regarding bio-weapons that is talked about in the book is real.

Maybe you need to realize that whatever is contained in a book of fiction can be fiction as well, even if on the "inside cover." Don't be so gullible.

Re:The Cobra Event

[juhaz]

Hmmmm? Gel Glass matrix? Sounds odd, I wonder who's doing research with GLASS and VIRAL infections?

Botulin is a bacterial toxin. If you don't even know that much (it's fscking common knowledge) why should anyone take the rest seriously?

Here's WSU's view on Viral Glass, they seem to think it's real:

WSU's view? They? That's a course material of one professor. Oh yeah, that paragraph is also talking about botuline, not viruses.

Perhaps I should read less and get out more, your right...

Well, you demonstrate a remarkable ignorance about even the basics of microbiology, and tried to use few hastily googled pages (36 hits, quite a few of those quotes from fiction, woo hoo, clearly commonly used real technology) having any glass and viruses, no matter the context, in the same page to pretend you know something about the topic.

Maybe you shouldn't read less, but you could start by checking WHAT you are reading, cross-checking for reference. And after reading, you might want to take few moments thinking before establishing it as an absolute truth.

Re:The Cobra Event

[DR SoB]

You argue just for the sake of arguing, but you miss the entire point. He said that viral glass doesn't exist. I showed some evidence that it does indeed exist.

"Well, you demonstrate a remarkable ignorance about even the basics of microbiology, and tried to use few hastily googled pages "

You want me to write a thesis or what? Sorry I don't feel like doing tons of research to prove everything to you at that level.

"having any glass and viruses, no matter the context, in the same page to pretend you know something about the topic."

Not true at all. I simple found a relevant university level prof stating the term "Viral-glass" and the fact that it does indeed exist. BTW- I said these technologies exist or were in development stages, it's hard to get information on some subjects that are in development stages for a very good reason.

Re:The Cobra Event

[Brandybuck]

If you are being mod-bombed, the best thing to do is mail Jamie or one of the Slashdot crew.

Unless they're the mod-bombers. It's been rumoured to happen before...

Re:The Cobra Event

[coastwalker]

Viral-glass seems to be lingo from old weapons programs in the 60's and earlier.

Google has more than enough information on bio weapons.

It is the fount of all knowledge and sometimes you rather wish it wasnt.

Duct tape

[stateofmind]

According to one report, workers were desperately sealing the doors with duct tape...

I'm looking through the The Jumbo Duct Tape Book on Amazon right now, and don't see any section on using duct tape to seal off biohazard doors... maybe they are saving that for the second edition. Duct Tape: 101 Nuclear and Biochemical Warfare Uses!

Josh

Re:Duct tape

[NOLAChief]

Haven't you been following the news the last couple of years? Duct tape is supposed to be able to save Joe Blow's ass in case of a biological attack, so why not use it to seal a BSL-4 lab? If Homeland Security says so, then it must be true! :-P

Re:Duct tape

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they got the idea from the Department of Homeland Security.
If if it's good enough for people to use to keep out such harmful pathogens it's good enough for scientist to use to keep them in.
Duct and cover was the movie they made for school kids wasn't it.

Re:Duct tape

[stateofmind]

Ha, your right. How could I have forgotten about that.

Nothing like giving people a false sense of security.

They do the same thing in the military with the MOP suits. (the chemical protection suits you see the soliders wearing, mask, boots, etc). I was a NBC (Nuclear/Bio-Chemical) Spec. in the Army, and at the end of NBC schooling they told us the suit would basiclly only allow you to live a few hours longer if you found yourself in the immediate radius of a chemical attack.

Enough time to shoot your buddy and put him out of his misery, call back to base and warn others, and then either shoot yourself or ponder life until you die.

Josh

Labor issues have plagued the facility...

[terraformer]

...for years. My parents still live on Long Island and I take the Orient point ferry (docks 100 yards from the Long Island depo servicing Plum Island) and for years there has been one union or another on strike there. You see them every time you take the ferry. The scary thing is that plum island used to be isolated but there are more and more people moving to the North Fork and that ferry is seeing a huge amount of growth these days with the casinos opening up in CT. Any mishap could be disastrous and be totally uncontainable due to the sheer numbers of people every which way on the ferry services through that area. Also, the ferry comes within a half mile of the island on a regular basis. I would imagine that is enough to put the passengers at risk and if any leak is not found immediately then when the passengers dock at CT or Orient they could be off and running infecting everyone else before it can be stopped.

Hannibal Lector?

[sielwolf]

Isn't this where they were going to send Hannibal Lector (or at least offered to since it was a ruse) in Silence of the Lambs?

How... delicious! *makes Lector Fava Beans sound*

Makes you wonder..

[Anonymous Coward]

..who the "terrorists" on this planet really are, with "bio labs" like these one thing you can really count on is mankind will be the architect of his own demise.

A>S

How....

[loserbert]

can I get a job in a place like this? I want to work someplace where people say "WOW".

Emergency systems

[plams]

The emergency brake (i.e. the handbrake) in trucks is usually kept open by compressed air. The compressed air is responsible for holding a spring back, so if the air is suddenly lost, for some reason, the spring will extend and brake the truck. (This is because the conventional brakes are powered by compressed air)

Maybe a similar system could be used to automaticly seal off contaminated areas, in case power is lost?

Re:Emergency systems

[StateOfTheUnion]

Maybe a similar system could be used to automaticly seal off contaminated areas, in case power is lost?

We do that when designing safety systems in chemical plants and refineries . . . critical systems are designed to "fail open" or "fail closed" depending on the situation. By "fail", I mean if the system loses power (whether it be electric, pneumatic, etc.) For example, one would not want a fuel gas valve on a boiler to "fail open" and one would not want a chilled water quench system on that same boiler to "fail closed." Also, there are almost always manual block valves in the event of a more catastrophic failure.

If the doors cited in the article fail open, it would imply that it is impossible/impractical to design a fail closed system for sealing the doors, triple redundant backup generators were considered sufficient to address the failure mode, or the engineer that designed the system should be sent to remedial engineering school.

Re:Emergency systems

[prat393]

Not a bad idea, actually. If they really insist on inflated seals, though, they might try a chemical reaction failsafe, similar to the way airbags are inflated.

As far as the safety of duct tape, I've heard it said that almost all of the "field procedures" for biocontainment absolutely rely on duct tape and its ilk; in fact, I've heard it said that containment is nearly impossible without some sort of sticky tape. Of course, this was for the purpose of sealing a pressurized suit for work in the field, but when your whole lab starts to die around you, it's probably not a bad thing to try, just a bad thing to have to try.

Re:Emergency systems

[Brandybuck]

The safety in a BSL4 lab is negative air-pressure, as a last line of defense. A tray particle can't get wafted out into the corridors. It's the opposite of most facilities, where the air conditioning creates positive air pressure.

How do you make a negative air-pressure failsafe? I can't think of any.

What the hell is WRONG with you people?

[JabberWokky]

Has NOBODY read the links provided? This is a veterinary research facility run by the USDA (the people who make sure our cows and chickens are healthy). Everybody is talking about "how horrible America keeps biological weapons". The whole facility is toured routinely by research scientists. While there's the possibility of a "secret gub'mint bug lab" elsewhere, it ain't here. The Plum Island Animal Disease Center is not a weapon research lab, there *are* backup generators (which didn't work), and it's not a video game.

Signal noise, people... Signal noise.

--
Evan

Re:What the hell is WRONG with you people?

[meadowsp]

And you think we'd see the same response if one of these was found in Iraq?

Re:What the hell is WRONG with you people?

[Pointdexter]

From the article...

Back in 1999, Floyd P. Horn, administrator of the Agriculture Research Service, persuaded President Clinton to include Plum Island in his expanded bioterrorism program based on the possibility of a biological attack on the nation's agricultural base. Last year the administration of the island's research facilities was transferred from USDA to the Department of Homeland Security.

Re:What the hell is WRONG with you people?

[JabberWokky]

Agriculture, not human disease. I just got pissed due to the assumptions being made: that it was human pathogens being studied and stored there for military application, that there were no generators or any backup power plans in place, or that there was a correlation to a zombie factory.

The tone was due to timing. It's a bit later in the morning and I'm much happier now. :)

--
Evan "Protested *for* the biolab in Davis"

Re:What the hell is WRONG with you people?

[andhar]

Hey, what the hell's wrong with YOU?

Had you read the story, you would know that control of the facility was tranferred from the USDA to the Dept. of Homeland Security.

Nitwit.

Re:What the hell is WRONG with you people?

[JabberWokky]

It's the USDA that still uses it, however. See my other posts to replies.

See this link in the story.

--
Evan

Re:What the hell is WRONG with you people?

[IncohereD]

Agriculture, not human disease.

Guess what anthrax is?? A _cow_ disease. I work at a government research lab in Canada, and I they had pictures from our lab out west where they were studying a cow that died of anthrax.

I'm not saying there's a conspiracy, but watch the assumptions you make. Or you may be coming down with avian flu sometime soon. :)

Re:What the hell is WRONG with you people?

[JabberWokky]

Weaponized anthrax and USDA anthrax research are very different things. Again, my point was that not every biolab is chock full of biological military weapons.

Yes, it's dangerous, but most human anthrax infections are dermal, and not a big deal. Bit of a rash that clears up with antibiotics. It's the weaponized encysted anthrax dust that gets into your lungs that is the nasty stuff. As a weapon, it's dropped by the ton.

My point was (and has been repeated many times now), the kneejerk "they make biowarfare munitions" posts were wrong.

--
Evan

Re:What the hell is WRONG with you people?

[IncohereD]

My point was (and has been repeated many times now), the kneejerk "they make biowarfare munitions" posts were wrong.

But again, how do you know? And even if they don't now, maybe they did?

Again, at my facility there's been several cases where remains of old chemical weapon experiments from the 50s have been dug up in the back 40, even AFTER the supposed site-wide clean-up initiative.

And it's basically been a communications research facility only for decades.

Again, I'm not saying there's a conspiracy, but you can't assume that:
a) there isn't
b) there never was

Re:What the hell is WRONG with you people?

[JabberWokky]

But again, how do you know? And even if they don't now, maybe they did?

Actually, I do know. Fort Terry was built sometime between 1897 and 1901. In 1946, a Foot and Mouth research facility (in response to the devastating Mexican outbreak) was built. Fort Terry was decommissioned in 1948, and reopened as a Top Secret facility for biological and chemical warfare.

So, yes, it was a factually verifiable Army B/C lab.

In 1978 there was an outbreak of Foot and Mouth around the facility. Oops. The resulting press interest and PR tours forced them to move all the classified stuff out of the facility (over the next decade). In 1992, the facility was demilitarized, and press and public tours of all facilities are now available.

Again, I'm not saying there's a conspiracy, but you can't assume that: a) there isn't b) there never was

a) This is an open facility, and...

b) I never assumed there wasn't, the island was off limits for about 45 years because they were doing publically acknowledged Bio and Chemical warfare research. That's not really a conspiracy.

They moved it to a different facility, and I'm sure the same research is going on elsewhere. After the military research moved out, the USDA took over the facility and now uses it. It's now officially under Homeland Security, but I don't see any indication that they are doing anything with it yet. The USDA still handles scheduling the use of the facilities and answers the phone.

--
Evan

Re:What the hell is WRONG with you people?

[JabberWokky]

To clarify one point - they officially were researching bio/chem warfare against animals. During the cold war, who knows what was being done there; the research during that period is still classified. But I'm only talking about what's there now, which is publically reviewable.

--
Evan

troll

[Anonymous Coward]

you are a troll

Re:troll

[Smidge204]

Since when is stating a lucid truth considered a troll?

=Smidge=

Also a wonderful read...

[SFBwian]

Plum Island, by Nelson DeMille, is an excellent laugh-till-your-side-hurts detective novel. I'm suprised it hasn't been made into a DeMille movie yet. :)

It also has a sequel, The Lion's Game, which isn't quite as good, but still worth the read.

Is this the same lab

[afidel]

Where all of the animals on the island died when some unknown pathogen was accidently released in the 1970's? If so there are some systemic problems and the site needs to be shut down. Having that kind of work done on the east coast is NUTS, put it out in the desert somewhere where accidents don't endanger a huge percentage of the U.S. population.

Re:Is this the same lab

[dzarn]

So somewhere where the prevailing winds would blow it into population centers, rather than over an open ocean?

Re:Is this the same lab

[jratcliffe]

Are you perhaps thinking about the Soviet anthrax release in 1979 at a bioweapons lab in Sverdlovsk? Killed about 60 people and a lot of livestock.

New Book about this "Lab 257"

[jayrtfm]

Michael Christopher Carroll's new book Lab 257 details the politics, lies and incompetence that surrounds the lab. While I haven't read the book yet, I did see him speak at B&N a few weeks ago when he kicked off the book tour. I was impressed by the thouroughness of his research (he had a few of the people who helped him there), getting the original documents from the National archives, comfirming stories by interviewing multiple witnesses, and speaking to the son of the man who started the lab.

He has done an audio interview on rense.com and onNPR (can't find the link)

What he describes sounds similar to the problems laid out by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

Re:New Book about this "Lab 257"

[Anonymous Coward]

While I haven't read the book yet, I did see him speak at B&N a few weeks ago when he kicked off the book tour. I was impressed by the thouroughness of his research

You didn't read the book, yet you were impressed by the thoroughness of his research? Yikes, you must have ESP or something! You could gain knowledge of his "research" without reading the book? You actually know that he has detailed the "politics, lies and incompentence" surrounding the lab, but you didn't read the book? Holy smokes, you're a bona fide marvel!

Or maybe you're just a gullible idiot who listens to Art Bell and desperately wants to believe that there is a gub'mint conspiracy to turn us all into radioactive, virus ridden zombies. Come on, admit it. You do, don't you. Yep, I thought so.

Oh, and Michael Christopher Carroll is a corporate lawyer. And we all know that corporate lawyers are experts on biological research safety standards and practices. Sheesh. You really are a gullible idiot.

Re:New Book about this "Lab 257"

[wass]

I saw him on an interview on TV a few days ago. He claimed Lyme's Disease came from this lab too, because Lyme Connecticut is relatively nearby, and there were some experiments at the lab on ticks. He didn't cite much evidence on the show beyond vague suppositions like this, though.

Anyway, whether you believe him or not, keep in mind he's marketing his book. Any controversy he stirs up will increase his sales (aka 'The Passion') and give him more profit. I tend to believe his stance is about as biased as the White House press secretary. But it's still more data points on the graph, even if they might have larger error bars.

Re:New Book about this "Lab 257"

[jayrtfm]

>>You didn't read the book, yet you were impressed by the thoroughness of his research? Yikes, you must have ESP or something!

I KNEW you were gonna say that {grin}

>>You could gain knowledge of his "research" without reading the book? You actually know that he has detailed the "politics, lies and incompentence" surrounding the lab, but you didn't read the book?

I did listen to him for an hour talking about what's in the book, and the audio interview, and many of the reviews including the Newsday one. So, yes, I know some of what's in the book without reading it.

>>Or maybe you're just a gullible idiot who listens to Art Bell....

Naw, I've heard much more James Randi than Bell. I'm a believer in not attributing to malevolence which can be explained by incompetence. In fact, Carroll made the point several times that he didn't think the only solution is to shut the lab down, he thought adaquate funding and better management could fix the problems.

>>corporate lawyers are experts on biological research safety standards and practices. Sheesh.

so if a lawyer said there was a bug in your software, you'd dismiss it because he's not a programmer? Haven't you ever caught mistakes outside your field of expertise?
Even if you dismiss everything Carroll himself says, you can't dismiss the the reports that he shines a light on, reports by the EPA and NYS Department of Environmental Conservation, who fined the lab for high levels of Fecal Coliform in the sewage being dumped.

Re:New Book about this "Lab 257"

[DerekLyons]

Someone that claims on his website that the "doesn't exist on the map" hasn't done his reaseach.

Try searching

• Terra Server for "Orient Point", then scroll slightly NW.
• Or MapQuest (same search).
• Or even Google

Reading the remainder of the site leaves me with the impression that he's a card-carrying member of the tinfoil hat brigade. If his work were serious, then it would sell without all the self-serving and misleading hysteria the site is brim full of.

Re:New Book about this "Lab 257"

[jayrtfm]

from the site:
"island unidentified on most maps. On the few where it can be found,"

that's a very different statement than what you quoted.

and if Open Source was a serious option, it would succeed in the marketplace without all the self-serving and hysteria the Slashdot site is brim full of.

Re:New Book about this "Lab 257"

[DerekLyons]

from the site:
"island unidentified on most maps. On the few where it can be found,"

Try reading the *whole* site. You'll find the passage "Even fewer can say whether it is inhabited, or why it doesn't exist on the map. That's all about to change.".

Regardless of which of the two contradictory statements on the website you choose to believe, they are both wrong. A very cursory search of the two largest map sites on the internet found the island easily. Furthermore his claim "on the few maps where it can be found" is equally easily demolished by examing the topographical map via Terraserver, and by examining a nautical chart of the area. (I happen to have an older on (circa 1989) in my map collection.) These are both widely and publically available.

Anyone who examines the maps can see that their are roads, which implies habitation. Anyone who examines the Terraserver photographs can see buildings, which implies habitation. So that claim is easily debunked as well.

When something so prominent on the site is wrong, then one wonders whats really in the rest of the book.

and if Open Source was a serious option, it would succeed in the marketplace without all the self-serving and hysteria the Slashdot site is brim full of.

Open source has diddly to do with it. Serious books are routinely sold without all the hype. However, this isn't media or marketing hype it's the authors own hype.

Reading the site and the excerpts, I place him firmly in the same category as Richard Hoagland. I.E. he *sounds* serious and reasonable, until one engages ones critical thinking skills.

Andromeda strain....

[earthforce_1]

Maybe the facility needs an automated nuclear self-destruct as in the movie/book "Andromeda Strain", when all else fails....

Of course, this backup might inexplicibly fail to function as well.

Re:Andromeda strain....

[|<amikaze]

Did you watch the movie? What if the pathogen will thrive on the energy released?!

Yet another example...

[cryptochrome]

... of why unions shouldn't be allowed anywhere near facilities which have the capacity for posing a serious hazard. Politics are OK in some places. A BSL-4 facility (or a nuclear reactor) is not one of them.

Re:Yet another example...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, slave labour is the most secure.

Re:Yet another example...

[Makoss]

Ohh come now, isn't this why we have robots? Just give them a nice central not-quite-AI and I'm sure everything will go fine. . .

Re:Yet another example...

[theLOUDroom]

Yet another example... ... of why unions shouldn't be allowed anywhere near facilities which have the capacity for posing a serious hazard. Politics are OK in some places. A BSL-4 facility (or a nuclear reactor) is not one of them.

Normally I would disagree with a statement like that. I think the rights a worker has in this country are pretty crappy and that as a nation we need to treat or workers better, but in this case 100% agree.

This is the type of thing that should be handled by orgainzations like the military (Coast guard perhaps?), where if you don't show up for work, you go to jail. (Unless you have a reasonable excuse of course.)


The potential consequences of an incident like this are just too serious. The people who are critcal to the operation of a place like this should be under contract, and the penalty for breaking the contract should be quite severe.

A facility like this is not the place for a sit-in or strike.

Re:Yet another example...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the type of thing that should be handled by orgainzations like the military

After witnessing first-hand the lack of safety and regard for the lives of themselves and co-workers, I think the military is exactly the wrong type of people to do stuff like that.

I believe the root issue is the still far too common "macho" attitude to "not be a wuss" when handling things like dangerous chemicals, electrical shock hazards, or non-visible dangers like nuclear or medical waste.

The people who are critcal to the operation of a place like this should be under contract, and the penalty for breaking the contract should be quite severe.

A facility like this is not the place for a sit-in or strike.

I seriously don't think it should be contracted out, because that will turn into being contracted out to the lowest bidder (or friend of the political party currently in power), not the best for the job.

I think high-risk environments should have unionized employees to ensure them

safe, healthly work environments (which as side efforts protects the rest of us)

whistle blower protection - to protect all of us

high enough salary to ensure they don't top up their income by selling secrets or "novelty" items smuggled from work

While unions are far from perfect, I think you will find actual unions are far more concerns with job security (raw number of people employed, not protecting lazy, incompotant, or criminal employees), and safe work environments. The salary is often the 3rd item of importance for most unions in North America.

Re:Yet another example...

[j-beda]

If you are going to remove a worker's right to collective bargaining, then you also have to ensure that they are given fair working conditions and pay through some other mechanism. I do not have any problem with specifying some services as "essential" and proof against strikes, but there does need to be some method of resolving employer/employee grievences. If you run your "vital infrastructure" by offering the contracts to the company who does the lowest bid, without any sort of protectios for the workers who actually do the jobs, I think you are leading yourself to ruin.

Re:Yet another example...

[theLOUDroom]

I believe the root issue is the still far too common "macho" attitude to "not be a wuss" when handling things like dangerous chemicals, electrical shock hazards, or non-visible dangers like nuclear or medical waste.

Then you clearly didn't RTFA.
The problem was that ALL THREE redundant generators were not working. Whether they were sabotaged or not, THE PEOPLE SUPPOSED TO BE RUNNING THEM WERE NOT THERE.

The problem wasn't somebody juggling vials of anthrax, it was the lack of personnel critical to the safety of the island.

Plum Island is Biosafety Level FIVE.

[MarkusH]

From a United Stataes Animal Health Association's 1998 Report:

Beyond the traditional four biosafety levels, U.S. Agriculture has an additional level, biosafety level 5 (BL5), designed for agents that by law are not allowed on the U.S. mainland. Both foot-and-mouth disease virus and rinderpest virus require that BL3-Ag facilities in which they are studied be separated from the mainland. There is only one facility in the U.S. that meets BL5 criteria -- the Plum Island Animal Disease Center.

Original Report Here.

Here's the offer

[burgburgburg]

CLARICE
Best of all, though - one week a year you'd get to leave the hospital and go here.
(points to a map)
Plum Island. Every afternoon of that week you can walk on the beach or swim in the ocean for up to one hour. Under SWAT team surveillance, of course...

DR. LECHTER
"Plum Island Animal Disease Research Center." Sounds charming.

CLARICE
That's just part of the island. It has a very nice beach. Terns nest there.

Didn't it used to be Bio-*Hazard* Level?

[smithmc]

I guess "Bio-Safety Level" is supposed to sound safer or something? "Oooh, this is a Bio-Safety Level 4 facility, it must be really safe!"

And Another Thing....

[turgid]

The backup systems should be designed to work without human intervention as much as possible. There should be proper procedures in place to make sure that everything is maintained. If not, they should shut down and not work again until safe to do so or make alternative arrangements for providing the power. This is not rockt science as they say. This is how safety-critical systems are managed in industry all the time, well at least in civillised countries.

Re:And Another Thing....

[Chibi Merrow]

Except that even critical and 'fail-safe' systems are not immune to sabotage by former employees.

Re:And Another Thing....

[turgid]

True, but you can mitiagte that by having regular inspections by different employees, and have it all recorded on paper and checked.

Re:And Another Thing....

[Chibi Merrow]

So employees must regularly completely dismantle the backup generators to verify they haven't been sabotaged? How regularly must they be dismantled? If they're 'regularly' inspected, wouldn't that make them easier to sabotage since you would know the gaps between inspections beforehand?

I think the simplest solution would be to keep Union workers the hell away from anything on which national security could depend.

Re:And Another Thing....

[turgid]

Once every three months is about right for diesel generators. You do have redundant backup generators, don't you? Whether the workers are in a union or not, where I come from, deliberately tampering with safety equipment is a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment.

Oh, and you do test run your diesels once a week don't you?

If not, you deserve everything you get.

Re:And Another Thing....

[Chibi Merrow]

You do have redundant backup generators, don't you?

In this case, Plum Island had triply redundant backup generators... Which means nothing if they're sabotaged. Cut some important wires and the whole system falls apart.

deliberately tampering with safety equipment is a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment

Since when does something being criminal stop human beings from doing it? Near where I live Teamsters drug a UPS driver from his truck and killed him because he crossed the picket line during the strike. Obviously murder is punishable by imprisonment, but that didn't stop him. And if you'd read the article, one of the strikers *WAS* convicted of sabotage.
Oh, and you do test run your diesels once a week don't you? If not, you deserve everything you get.

Ignoring the obvious immaturity of that argument... You must have missed my previous point. Regular testing of generators does nothing to prevent sabotage. If you test your generator every Friday morning well then all I have to do is sabotage it on Friday afternoon and you won't know for a week.

Besides, whether or not one has tested their safety equipment does NOT excuse someone of guilt for having sabotaged it.

Rotten.com

[brownja]

once again, rotten.com beats /. to the punch.

Re:Rotten.com

[Evangelion]

Not a surprise, since I ripped the story straight from there.... :)

I'm glad it's on an island...

[zuikaku]

...and patrolled by the military. It makes it that much less likely that the ALF or PETA can break in and let the Rage out.

People are paranoid these days!

[rahvin112]

We are talking about a lab where they analyze viri and microbes that are deemed Level 4. Ebola is considered Level 4 because it's lethal and incurrable. On the other hand based on research done on the Zimbabwe outbreak Ebola is almost only transmissible in unsanitary hospital conditions (such as sharing needles).

Experimentation with these Level 4 infectious diseases is to develop cures and/or vaccines. The specimens are contained in sealed media, in sealed cabinets, in pressurized rooms protected by airlocks and pressure flow. Given the complete failure of the pressure system and a catastropic release of the specimen out into the building (of which there is probably a better chance that the facility will be hit be a metor) it's still not going to sail miles away and depending on the specimen may not even infect any of the workers even if they were exposed. We are taking about microorganisms here, they dont' get up and walk out of the building. For the vast majority of infectious diseases without a vector to transmit the disease the other microorgasims present in every square inch of this planet will consume the infectious organism.

Re:People are paranoid these days!

[pjt33]

On the other hand based on research done on the Zimbabwe outbreak Ebola is almost only transmissible in unsanitary hospital conditions (such as sharing needles).

Then why's there such a high infection rate among doctors and nurses who treat Ebola patients without wearing pressurised suits?

Re:People are paranoid these days!

[rahvin112]

If I remember the CDC report correctly the only doctors and nurses that got the disease got it from handling patients with unsanitary measures. As soon as the CDC arrived and brought the 50tons of medical supplies with them the outbreak was contained. Availability of gloves, masks and disposable needles and other sanitary medical supplies elimated new cases in something like 3 days. Somewhere out there is a copy of the CDC report on the outbreak, check it out.

Value of a scabs life....

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

I found the failure of all three of the island's backup generators particularly provocative

I too think this is odd. First of all, I work in a secure computing environment that requires 100% up-time. Our system, including the air handling units, are attached to just a huge pile of batteries. These batteries, in turn, are hooked up to three generators the size of small trucks. They power up automagickally on power failure. We run them up manually once a month for training, but that's for situations where for some reason they don't come on line by themselves.

While I understand why the union guys are pissed, tampering with equipment that could cost loss of life, even if that life does belong to some union crushing scab, is ethically and morally wrong.

Re:Value of a scabs life....

[TheSync]

I work in an environment that is 100% mission critical. Yet we took a power hit. The control center is powered by UPSes until the generator can take over. Because of that, no one in the center even noticed that the power went out, because the UPS kept the center going. Until the UPS ran out and the lights turned off.

The generator never started. Why? The generator battery was dead. Someone had accidently kicked a switch from 12V to 6V to charge the battery immediately after the last weekly test.

So power was out for a few minutes while people raced to drive their car around to the generator and "jump-start" it.

Re:Value of a scabs life....

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

The generator battery was dead. Someone had accidently kicked a switch from 12V to 6V to charge the battery immediately after the last weekly test.

Sometimes it's an accedent, sometimes not. All three machines failed? Also, in this case, they should have had a battery pile that would have run things for a half hour or so. It' was dead too?

Re:Value of a scabs life....

[TheSync]

Nope, the battery worked fine for a half an hour. The problem was that nobody knew the power had gone out, because the lights stayed on till the battery died...

Re:Must be all Americans on drugs perhaps?

[Retric]

They had 3 sets of backup generators they ALL failed. The question is was it from incompatice or malace? Considering it's a goverment project I would asume both were involved but that's just me.

I'll trust them on this one...

[Anonymous Coward]

"We're equally proud of our safety record."

Plum Island!

[Bluesman]

If you haven't read the book "Plum Island" by Nelson DeMille, do yourself a favor and go get a copy. It's one of the most entertaining books I've ever read. His detective character is hilarious.

I'd imagine most of the geeks here would appreciate the dry humour and sarcasm.

Level 3 is closer than you think

[ka9dgx]

Any decent hospital Emergency Room deals with Level 2 all the time (sharps, blood, etc), and will see Level 3 on a fairly regular basis (Tuberculosis, Encephalitis, etc).

--Mike--

Re:Level 3 is closer than you think

[lukesl]

I used to work in a BSL3 facility, and what you are saying is not true. Hospital ERs are not at the level of a BSL2 lab facility, which has hoods with HEPA filters IIRC. Level 3 requires a negative pressure room with an airlock, hoods with HEPA filters, double gloves, special gowns that close in the back, and sometimes ventilators. No air leaves the room except through filters. This is not like a hospital ER.

Re:Level 3 is closer than you think

[Anonymous Coward]

Your confusing a lvl 3 facility with lvl 3 pathogins.

Hm.. the shuttle is fail safe?

[basingwerk]

> The shuttle is as close to a fail-safe > system as our species is capable of. There are far safer ways of getting around the planet than catching the space shuttle.

Re:Hm.. the shuttle is fail safe?

[HokieJP]

Yeah, clearly this dude has not read the CAIB report, or any substantial news about that accident.

Just another example of the quality sensationalism that too frequently makes the /. main page.

Yeh, and M$ is in on the SCO deal too!

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

The Anthrax attacks which have largely faded in to obscurity, unsolved, should be a source of deep concern to American's and the world. They might have been perpetrated by a roque wacko that had access to Anthrax in one of these facilities. Its pretty unlikely they were perpetrated by an Arab terrorist. They could have just as easily been a covert operation perpetrated by a misguided government agency designed to stoke fear of WMD's in the U.S. Coincidentally the Bush administration, right after this used the threat of WMD's as the rationale to attack Iraq though no significant WMD programs have been found there. They will, no doubt, continue to use WMD's as a rationale for preemptive warfare assuming they can get away with it after the bold faced lie the war in Iraq has proven to be.

Hey now, cool your tin foil jets! You sound like one of those paranoid hippies who think Microsoft has something to do with the SCO situation... (it's a joke...)

Re:Yeh, and M$ is in on the SCO deal too!

[demachina]

I forgot to add the choice of targets for the Anthrax attacks is particularly intrigueing. As you recall it was two leading Democratic senators and several media outlets including NBC.

What would be accomplished by these particular targets? In the case of Democractic senators its extremely useful to insure Congress will vote your way when you come in later with claims Iraq has WMD's and is an imminent danger of using them aginst the U.S. and to insure Congress will vote lots of money for WMD research and defenses. Congress living with vivid recollection of its own Anthrax attack was much more likely to vote for war to defend the U.S. from this threat. It kind of explains why the Democrats rolled over when the time came to green light the Iraq war.

The same can be said for the media. They became much more sympathetic to the danger of WMD's than they would have been if they hadn't been attacked themselves.

An arguement could be made this was all "Good For America". Perhaps those in power were legitimately concerned about the danger of biowarfare attacks against the U.S. but felt they couldn't get the funding or priority placed on defenses unless they staged a little demo. Sure a few people died but in the national security establishment calculus that is a small price to pay to help protect America from all threats, foreign and domestic.

Re:Yeh, and M$ is in on the SCO deal too!

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Sorry about the joke, it's a troll that had to be said. But yes, there is something flaky about the source of the Anthrax, the targets, and the fact that they haven't pinned it on anyone yet.

Re:Yeh, and M$ is in on the SCO deal too!

[dustmote]

You know, the thing that scares me is that even though I'm *almost certain* that this sort of thing is (-1, Tinfoil Hat), it is believable enough and I trust the leverages of power right now in my own country little enough that I'm not sure. I'm really not sure. That my trust has eroded that far is a horrifying sign of things wrong, true or not.

Re:Yeh, and M$ is in on the SCO deal too!

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget to mention that the NYpost was attacked as well. The most popular right wing paper in NYC. The two senators that were attacked were hit at a time when the Democrat party was in power in the senate making them legitimate non-partisan targets. Attacking them for the power they hold not the party they belong to.

Step away from the kool-aid boy you have already had too much to drink.

What the hell is WRONG with you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll somewhere else. Or tell it the scientiest
unable to visit the US, as "prions" are on the
list of possible bilogical weapons...

Re:What the hell is WRONG with YOU?

[Gen. Malaise]

Did YOU RTFA? It was transferred in 1999 to The Dept of Homeland Security. The article also states that in '54 some scientists were looking to cook up ways to inflict damage on Soviet livestock. You are right there is no "secret gub'mint bug lab" here.....its public knowledge. Could someone with mod points plese dispose of the parent troll?

Re:What the hell is WRONG with YOU?

[JabberWokky]

Livestock is a significantly different thing than biowarfare against humans - which many of the respondants to this article are making the assumption this lab is designed for. Robert Smith's lyrics notwithstanding, there is a massive difference between meat and murder. A massive failure in security at this facility won't result in the loss of human lives, nor is there anything that affects humans in there (well, other than commercial loss and the emotional impact of the death of pets). That's the facts, not that this is some sort of zombie factory or human disease warfare lab - which is the implication or assertion in over half the posts made at the time I made the original post.

--
Evan "Hardly trolling, although a bit undercaffenated and thus strident in tone"

Don't you just love the implied...

[cnelzie]

...and sensationalist writing style spit out by this 'reporter'?

Where's the objectivity?

I understand that New York, is really close to Detroit in having some of largest populations of people from the Middle East. It is EXTREMELY possible that someone that visited the Nile area and then returned to their home in New York could have brought that virus into the US with them. There are so many scenarios possible it's plain silly...

This article smacks of the scare-mongering tactics used in such 'reputable' news sources like 'The Metro Times' in Detroit, as well as any number of left/right-wing 'news' sources used to further someone's political agenda.

It carries just enough facts to seem credible and then adds so much personal opinion and bias that the credibility should be tossed out by any reasonable person. Unfortunately, it is designed to cater to highly emotionally charged people that want to have something to constantly rail against.

Duct Tape

[Anonymous Coward]

See, Duct tape is the solution to all our problems!

The thought that some people wanted to power grid is ludicrous
No?

Lecter

[humberthumbert]

Don't worry, Dr. Hannibal Lecter stays on that island. He'll take care of business.

Time for a Reagan-like solution?

[Chordonblue]

Remember PATCO? No? Well, not too many people do. They were the striking air traffic controller guys back in the 80's. Fired. Boom. Done.

Why? In the interest of public safety. If this situation isn't in the interest of public safety I don't know what is.

I suggest they go the 'binding arbitration' route. If this is refused by the union, then it's time to start writing pink slips. This is too important.

Re:Time for a Reagan-like solution?

[mandalayx]

Remember PATCO? No? Well, not too many people do. They were the striking air traffic controller guys back in the 80's. Fired. Boom. Done.

Why? In the interest of public safety. If this situation isn't in the interest of public safety I don't know what is.


I don't think that the Bush administration is even that hesitant to take action against labor unions. I remember reading here on /. that they used the Taft act on the Oakland seaport dock workers, with no ostenible threat to public safety that I can see.

On the other hand, I feel a bit disapointed in the Bush administration and would not expect them to take control or even bring attention to this situation for it is an election year..

Hilarious!

[Chibi Merrow]

This is so hilarious... Someone who read the article, quotes it, and quotes researched facts is considered a troll! Only on Slashdot!

Why is /. linking to a crackpot?

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, the NY Press is hardly a reputable news outlet. Secondly, the article's writer openly claims to have "scored some weed" during the "incident." Third, he makes overt suggestions that this facility is related to outbreaks of Lyme disease and West Nile in New York.

Lastly and most important, the only sources the author really attributes have nothing to do with the lab! All the rest are unnamed. Nobody with authority is interviewed, and he uses the old urban legend trick of giving out a few names of legit companies and agencies that maybe do related work (maybe not) and then proceed to concoct a story around them!

I'll bet if this story is actually investigated, hardly any of it will be true.

What???

[Maljin Jolt]

Why such a dangerous facility has no autonomous power generator? I can't understand. In my country, autonomous power generator is an obligation to have for every simple hospital since the communist era.

just a thought on generators

[subjectstorm]

i work in a network control center.

while our function is important, it isn't "critical", in that, should we completely shut down, no one would actually die.

having said that, i should now like to point out that we have two procedures in place to ensure that we do not experience a power outage:

one is an enormous CAT generator that is tested every tuesday and thursday. the lights blink for a moment, that's all. regular tests of any back-up power system are certainly advisable.

the second is an enormous bank of batteries. the main function of this is as sort of a universal UPS, keeping the computers from going down while the generator gets up. granted, it won't last long, but it is SOMETHING.

they can blame anyone they want for the failure of the generators, but, barring outright sabotage immediately before the power outage, i'd say this entire fiasco is the result of piss poor testing procedures. one could have any number of back-up generators in reserve . . . but if they aren't tested ROUTINELY, this is the sort of crap that can and does happen.

Re:just a thought on generators

[descil]

Unfortunately, money is protected a lot more carefully than human lives.

re

[Anonymous Coward]

Yah.

Think 'sanitation' with a nuke and the Andromeda strain.

But, since you chaps 'insist' on developing chemical and biological weapons... still.

Without power

[Anonymous Coward]

The backup generator kick in and everything is fine.

The Umbrella Group, and it's parent company, ...

[burgburgburg]

Canopy are working for the protection of humanity through their efforts with SCO to ensure IP property rights, whether they be for Operating Systems or for the T-Virus. How dangerous a world would this be if open-source virus creation was freely allowed? Virus creation must be restricted to responsible, for-profit organizations that will use and allocate these resources in a consitent manner.

Oh, and even one scratch from the zombies and you'll become one too, so watch out.

PUtting your ignorance to the side for...

[cnelzie]

...a moment. This is really an example of Anti-Union reporting if I ever did see it. First, the 'reporter' talks about how all of this happened because of scab workers.

Would this have happened if there weren't any scab workers at the facility? Probably not.

However, it seems that like most dopeheads the author seems confused as he attacks the heck out of the scabs by defaming them more then a few times through the article. Of course, he also defames the union members as well by implying quite heavily of potential sabotage.

All in all, this article seems to be a really strong case for keeping unions out of places that could cause a public health crisis.

Plum Island is not BSL4!

[xanthines-R-yummy]

... at least according to the American Society of Microbiologists (an organization waaay more credible than any news magazine, in my opinion).

They publish some VERY highly regarded journals. No, not Nature or Science, but still important.

Union Busters

[Detritus]

Mother Jones has an interesting article that provides some background on the labor problems at Plum Island. It appears that the contractor, LB&B Associates, with USDA assistance, is trying to destroy the union.

Re:Union Busters

[Eagle7]

And good for them for doing it.

I am amazed that for all the anti-WMD drivel being spouted in the comments, no one has made mention that the union walked off a job where they provided life-vs-death services, and then used the failures of those services under the so-called "scabs" to flaunt thier position.

Regardless of what one might think of unions (I personally think that in thier current state they cause more harm than good) this is simply irresponsible behavior. In taking a job at a facility like this, you take on a responsibility to society, not just to an employeer. These people walking off this job at midnight is no more excusable then a heart surgeon walking out in the middle of surgery because he doesn't like his contract with the hospital.

The shame here falls squarely on the shoulders of the union members for placing the lives of NYers in the balance of thier precious contracts, not on the "scabs" that we brought in to do the job that the union irresponsibly walked out on.

Re:Union Busters

[valkraider]

Unions suck. I know, I have to pay dues to one every month, whether I want to or not. And all they do is keep the crappiest employees employed while reducing career potential for the best and the brightest...

Re:Union Busters

[Anonymous Coward]

Unions suck. I know, I have to pay dues to one every month, whether I want to or not. And all they do is keep the crappiest employees employed while reducing career potential for the best and the brightest...

No, unions do not keep the crappiest employees employed, typically that is a sign of weak or crappy management who are unwilling to justify firing a bad employee.

"[R]educing career potential for the best and the brightest"

Bullshit, maybe you are not as good or bright as you think you are. Unions promote fair and transparent (and appealable) employee evaluations and promotion, not selection based merely on favoritism and nepotism.

Re:Union Busters

[Anonymous Coward]

hah, IBEW is synonymous for nepotistism.

Re:Union Busters

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely wrong. You must be a union steward.

Re:Union Busters

[khallow]

The shame here falls squarely on the shoulders of the union members for placing the lives of NYers in the balance of thier precious contracts, not on the "scabs" that we brought in to do the job that the union irresponsibly walked out on.

If I were running something like Plum Island, I wouldn't have given them an excuse to walk out. That means generous pay, good working environment, and professionally dealing with the workers, unions, and contractors. Part of the problem here seems to be some sort of political game going on with the contractor in collusion with the administrators. That's just as inexcusable as the people who apparently sabotaged the power supplies (and incidentally deserve serious jail time).

I certainly wonder why Plum Island is in the midst of a months long strike. Ultimately though, it's the administration of Plum Island that let this situation get so out of hand. President Bush should personally fix this.

Plum Island, heh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been trying to get to Plum Island, but I got so drunk on Near Grog (TM) I couldn't leave Phatt Island.

A better reference to Level 5 status

[burgburgburg]

From the USAHA web site:

Dr. Mike Kiley discussed biocontainment and explained biosafety levels 1 through 5 with the Plum Island facility as level 5. He emphasized the necessity of upgrading the present ARS facilities to maintain the required biosecurity.

Okay, now I REALLY, REALLY want to start to panic!

ad hominem attack

[Anonymous Coward]

An ad hominem attack (rather than arguing with the logic of the post) destroys all credibility of the poster. I've now added you to my "enemies" list. Oh wait. I'm anonymous. I don't have an enemies list. D'Oh!!!!

Did YOU read the article?

[Silvers]

The point of the article is not that the center isn't needed. It's that something so horribly stupid can occur there in a lvl 4 facility.

Simply saying "Well we had back up generators, but they didn't work. Sorry." Does not cut it.

Re:Did YOU read the article?

[JabberWokky]

When did I say anything with regard to the facility or the events that transpired there? I was just ticked about the kneejerk posts made in the first ten minutes after this story was posted. It was a comment on Slashdot, not the story.

--
Evan

Oh, great reporting

[uarch]

"I packed up the car, scored some weed, picked up my girlfriend and headed to the Jersey Shore, just to be on the safe side"

Now that's a comment that'll make people believe this guy is a real journalist.

Strange Brew

[sweatyboatman]

Everybody knows level 5 makes the hockey players in white try to kill the hockey players in black. And visa-versa.

B.M. Smith
Put them in the game. Take it to level 5.

Ted
Level 5, sir?

B.M. Smith
LEVEL 5!!

Be Prepared

[sharkey]

They caught it this time, or did they? Better read the research that's been done on this sort of thing.

Homeland security

[Anonymous Coward]

As stupid as the Department of Homeland Security is, it is a defensive organization. They don't create bioweapons. Also, the wording of the 1954 sentence is suspect. What does it mean that scientists were looking to cook up bioweapons? Does that mean it wasn't a real program? Does it mean they didn't succeed?

This thing just plain isn't a bioweapons facility. Go ahead and put on your tinfoil hat and try to make it one if you want.

Interesting

[CBob]

On how the author makes the jump from reporting "incidents" and "accidents" (no relation to the strike, no NY union would ever do such things(cough)) to bio-weapons research w/o no real link and then cites works of fiction as reference.

Most of which has nothing to do w/the issue that there may be serious safety concerns due to some goofball's actions. 3x backup systems don't fail w/o a good reason.

Greed

[dysk]

When the employees go on strike, stop the experiments, and maintain only the staff necessary to ensure security and an orderly shutdown/storage of materials.

It sounds like they wouldn't have had nearly the problems if the lab was already in standby.

Damn right, but one comment...

[dwalsh]

"They could have just as easily been a covert operation perpetrated by a misguided government agency designed to stoke fear of WMD's in the U.S."

Morally misguided, yes, but very effective. Remember when your elected representatives had to leg it out of the building pronto? This was about the time they might have made civil rights based objections to some new legislation under discussion.

Fucking unions

[ToadMan8]

See, striking workers causing power outages and not caring about spreading disease and chemical agents as long as they get their extra 0.40 $ per hour... Unions are like hundreds of schoolchildren getting together to overthrow the administration when the administration may be annoying but know what's best for the future of the children, the school and education in general. Christ that's dangerous and annoying. It's even worse in the public sector because the employer can't hire permenant replacements for monetarily striking workers. Don't get me wrong, safety or working condition striking unions are completely in the right but for monetary gain.... if you don't like what the market pays get another fucking job.

Re:Fucking unions

[forkboy]

I freakin hear ya man. In this day and age of class action lawsuits and lawyers aplently, I hardly see blue collar workers as being the exploitable saps they were in the early 1900's when unions first started forming. All it takes is one abused worker to get the ball rolling and any company that's truly exploiting its workers is FUCKED.

Modern unions just make the workers lazy and hard to deal with. They're an excuse for lethargic douchebags to get regular raises without putting in any effort. And people wonder why we're shipping our jobs overseas.

Re:Fucking unions

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the fuck up.

Re:Must be all Americans on drugs perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

i agree, fuck shit stains and the smelly place they are from!!!!!!

go home asians and pakis

Re:Must be all Americans on drugs perhaps?

[Flavius Stilicho]

To not have generators attached to sickness warfare laboratories. In India we have generators in apartment buildings. Somehow, America does not have generators in sickness warfare facilities in a city of millions and millions. Very strange people.

Yeah, we eat cows too.

From the article...

[Infernon]

"I packed up the car, scored some weed, picked up my girlfriend and headed to the Jersey Shore, just to be on the safe side."

Dude, you should be doing that anyway!

Zombies

[meplaysocr]

And here I thought Dawn of the Dead was just another Zombie movie, not a documentary.....

I thought we were going to Candy Apple Island

[MattGWU]

Candy Apple Island? What do they have there?

Viruses, but they're not as deadly.

Biosafety Level Misinformation

[abb3w]

References to BSL5 appear to be using poor/outdated terminology.

A non-canonically sourced article here (coincidentally mentioning Plum island) mentions "The confusion stems from two separate ranking systems, one for organisms and one for facilities. There are four levels of facilities, said Ms. Hays. And there are four levels of organisms. But once upon a time there were five levels of organisms, the top rank reserved for animals diseases forbidden in the mainland U.S."

A passing reference to this old classification system can be seen here.

The current CDC listing of Biosafety Criteria is here.

My quick searches using Google to check US government web sites turns up only a handful of references, all false positives (so to speak). This suggests that any mention of BSL-5 is either outdated, incorrect, fictitious, or (for the paranoid) leaked classified information.


Having read the BSL-4 specs from the CDC, about the only step up I can imagine for a BSL-5 facility is "Remote teleoperation only; no on-site human presence allowed. No material, organic or otherwise, may ever leave the facility." Anyone stupid enough to even try to play with something that would need that level of containment ought to be shot; it isn't even useful as weapon, it just exteminates the species.

Re:Biosafety Level Misinformation

[afidel]

From the USAHA 1998 report mentioned by another reply:

Dr. Alfonso Torres, Center Director, Plum Island Animal Disease Center, reminded the audience of the purpose of the Plum Island facility and the importance of its location. He pointed out that while operation and maintenance costs are more than $10 million per year, there would not be a great savings by moving the facility onto the mainland of the United States. This is the only level 5 biocontainment facility in the United States and by having it on the island, there is more security when working with foot-and-mouth disease virus, etc.

Well if the director of the facility is calling it a Level 5 facility only 6 years ago I would hardly call that outdated or incorrect as in theory he should know more than anyone about the subject. Basically they are saying that Plum Island is a facility where it's a good idea to work on the nastiest of nasty germs, I would dispute this and say that a new facility should be constructed somewhere far away from population centers, say a desert island.

Re:Biosafety Level Misinformation

[the eric conspiracy]

BSL levels 1-4 are defined in places like:

http://www.cdc.gov/od/ohs/biosfty/bmbl4/bmbl4s3. ht m

The Plum Island directors are referring to a specialized level for livestock diseases; i.e. BL's which are defined by the Dept of Agriculture. The USDA Level 5 definition is a BL level 3-Ag (modifications to BSL-3 to handle animal, not human pathogens) facility that is separated from the mainland, i.e. on an island. Plum Island is a mechanically level 3-Ag facility that get a level 5 Ag rating BECAUSE IT IS ON AN ISLAND.

In this case BL-5 is lower security than BSL-4, and may not even qualify for BSL-3. And it does not contain human pathogens.

Re:Biosafety Level Misinformation

[abb3w]

Well if the director of the facility is calling it a Level 5 facility only 6 years ago I would hardly call that outdated or incorrect as in theory he should know more than anyone about the subject.

The citation you give is on the web site of (what based on this reference amoung others, I judge is essentially) a lobbying organization, giving draft notes from a meeting between representatives of the group and various government officials. Furthermore, that was in 1998, only two years after the 1996 change in terminology. Inexact terminology was excusable.
It is not, say, a current official government publication, or official testimony to congress.

It is now eight years since the correct parlance has changed. Using the old terminology is no longer appropriate.

Of course, while the term for the facility and the bugs may have changed from BSL-5 to BSL-4, that doesn't change how #$%^ing dangerous the stuff really is. They were then and still are the nastiest bugs on the planet, and have not gotten one whit safer in the meanwhile. While I'm not sure what the best location would be for such a facility, you're right: putting one that close to New York City is rank insanity.

Yes you should

[sterno]

Yes, you should be able to strike. And they should pay you well enough and give you good enough benefits to insure that you don't want to strike. It sounds like the management of the facility believed that they could get away with less skilled employees. It seems they were wrong.

If you assume for the moment that the workers weren't allowed to strike, then how would they express their unhappiness with the state of their employment? They'd slack off unofficially, and they might passive aggressively due harm to the facilities. Frankly, it's better that they can strike and have an official way to air their displeasure than have it be something that slowly eats away at the facility.

Re:Yes you should

[glenrm]

How would they express their unhappiness with the state of their employment?
Find another job?

Thank God I don't live out there

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes thank God! Those idiots living out by Plumb Island are Morans. MORANS! I tell you.

Anyway I have to get back to work out here in commack then drive home to Brentwood!!!

Its Flame-Bait because ...

[torpor]

... its tongue in cheek? Because it scares you that the 'enemies of America' (A-rabs) may actually be on to something, in their objections over super-technology facilities like this being created by people who obviously can't keep them under control and who have a distorted, banal, base value for life on this planet?

Ken Alibek(ov)

[Chitlenz]

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385 334966/qid=1079632818/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/102-04375 66-8960154?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Biohazard was written by the head of the Russian bioweaponeering program in the 80s-90s. There are literally pictures of him standing with a bunch of scientists in places like Plum Island (i thiknk its actually in Arkansas at the Pine Bluff facility) during one of the many "goodwill" tours the USSR and the US had during treaty negotiations after the cold war.

This book is SCARY. Apparently, the chimera virus so easily discounted earlier in this post is very real, and was an attempt to mix ebola and smallpox and seal it in gelatinized capsules to make it airborne and able to survive the explosion of delivery by bombs. Why bother? Because their research was based on whatever was considered INCURABLE in the west. Several accidents in russian experiments are well documented, and show up in old news reports as "food poisoning" or other polically correct reasons for mass deaths in suburban areas. Apparently in one case, someone got drunk and forgot to put the air filters back on at an Anthrax plant and killed a bunch of folx.

2 points: someone noted that this is small scale research. This is incorrect, as Ken Alibek notes that weaponized germs have to be produced by the TON in order to keep the stockpile of arms fresh enough for maximum impact. Think about what a TON of ebola would do to anywhere. Second, where did all this shit go? He documents how at least one of the starving workers at a smallpox plant slipped out with a live vial (from a lvl4 facility) to try to sell it as a supplemental income. In lots of cases, noone knows where it all went.

The upside is that it mostly doesn't work as effectively as it's billed. Spraying an agent would probably only infect a small number of people, since delivery of a live virus is apparently a very hard thing to accomplish effectively.

-chitlenz

Re:Ken Alibek(ov)

[Seoulstriker]

since delivery of a live virus is apparently a very hard thing to accomplish effectively.

Viri are not alive at all. They are just protein capsules of genetic information and maybe a relicase depending on the type of virus. Bacteria, on the other hand, are quite alive.

evacuate long island?

[Heisenbug]

This place is located 'two miles off the tip of Long Island' though, right? It seems possible that wasn't the best place to put it, in terms of contingency plans for the surrounding population. Long Island is a pain to commute from even on a good day. Imagine all 3 million residents in a blind panic to leave? The virus itself would be the least of your worries.

Re:evacuate long island?

[shotfeel]

Don't mean to be picking on you, this is also in reply to the last few posts I've read, and I'm 3/4 joking when I say this, but...

Some people have been watching too many movies, especially the article's author.

If nothing else, the last thing you want to do if there's an outrbreak is go running around exposing yourself to as many people as possible. Stay in your house and don't let anybody in until its safe. Its not like there's going to be an accidental release of a large "cloud" of infectious material that's going to take over Long Island.

Re:evacuate long island?

[leviramsey]

And it's not like there's much population east of Riverhead in Suffolk County anyway...

I love it!

[Anonymous Coward]

First the poster says:

The U.S. would like you to believe they stopped developement of bioweapons in 1969 but you would have to be an optimist to believe that is really the case since the U.S. consistently opposes any international effort to verify bioweapons labs are not being used for new weapons research.

Then he (or she) says:

WMD's are the perfect rationale for preemptive warfare. You can accuse any country of developing them and its impossible for the target country to prove they don't. Every nation in the world has dual use industrial equipment that can be redirected to chemical and biological weapons production

In other words:

First, demachina accuses the US of producing bioweapons, without having any real evidence.

Then, he (or she) complains that the US accuses nations of producing bioweapons, without having any real evidence.

Now, I call this brilliant!

Location is the key...

[innerweb]

If Bush wants a reason to build a space station solely on US funding, this would be it. I can not think of a more secure place to do this research than a space station. Surrounded by vacuum and very high doses of incredibly lethal radiation. A leak up there would definitely be limited. Big worry would be a potential reentry of the facility or something from the facility. But, you deal with that on a daily basis now.

If he were smart, he would put the two together, make his buddies in the defense industry happy many times over - contracts for rockets (or shuttles), station building and materials, bio weapons research. Oh, yeah, the military would love it, as it would be very secure. Talk about low risk of espionage. No one's going to just drop a suitcase out the window here. Then, after some time has passed, build a new stations somewhere else and sell tourist tickets to visit the original bio weapons research space station.

InnerWeb

Re:Biosafety Level FIVE.

[No Such Agency]

So BL5 is really a legal creation, not a property of the agents being worked on. By your definition, BL5 doesn't exist outside the USA, whereas even Chad could (in theory) build a BL4 lab. Also, I suspect that only very small parts of the facility are rated BL5, probably wholly contained withing BL3 or 4 areas.

obviously not a drinker

[Anonymous Coward]

Ocean City, NJ is a dry town. The only one in the state of NJ as far as I know. Be careful smoking pot there though. The cops are really hardcore there.

How much money do they burn through?

[rice_burners_suck]

Without power, the air filtration systems are inoperable. Without power, decontamination procedures break down. Without power, the seals in the pressurized airlock doors start to deflate...

No doubt, they work on government funding, and lots of it. So they can afford a Level 4 air filtration system. So they can afford decontamination procedures. So they can afford pressurized airlock doors...

BUT THEY CANNOT AFFORD A GASOLINE OPERATED POWER GENERATOR?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Methinks this story is a bunch of hogwash.

Cost-Effective Homeland Insecurity

[Doc Ruby]

You'd think that BushCo's invocation of bioterror at every turn would be backed up with support for these bio research labs, and especially their staff. These geeks are the high-tech asset giving us our edge in bioweapons and defense, not the collapsing building they work in. You can bet that they're not cashing in on any Bush tax breaks like their neighbors in Connecticut and the Hamptons. And as geeks, you know it must really be bad out there for them to stoop to such untidy blue-collar tactics as a strike, especially in Republican dominated Long Island. So we should wave them goodbye as they float across the Atlantic to friendlier Europe, with its own rising demand for bioweapons experts, where many of these geeks come from, and many foreigners will find friendlier than The Homeland. And if you get in some sympathetic "Bon Voyage" messages now, they might let you crash at their flats when their debacle happens to you.

Re:Cost-Effective Homeland Insecurity

[t_allardyce]

Nah i dont think you really understand George Bush. He isnt against 'terrorism' per-se, well infact hes partial to partake in a little of it himself - eg, "shock and awe", "your either with us or with the terrorists" etc. Hes more using the phrase (which really is just a way to say criminal/murderer etc) to scare the american public into such a state that they dont care who gets tax breaks or if their pension gets cut to 5 cents. Why do you think he created that colour coded alert system? why is every news channel mentioning terrorism every hour of the day? Bush is out to do whatever it is he is trying to do for himself, im just not sure if thats world domination, money, or just pleasing his chums.

Janitors != Engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a Janitor strike. last time I checked janiors were only called sanitation engineers behind their backs, not in the paper. Is this even a real newspaper?

Mars rocks at Level 5

[Big Bob the Finder]

There has been some discussion about the Mars rocks that may eventually be returned to Earth. Containment for those particular nuggets of goodness will consist of unprecedented biosafety security. Who knows if they'll refer to it as Level 5 or not.

All of which means that there'll probably be unprecedented failure, but that's just my inner cynic speaking.

As an aside the moon rocks were returned with some modicum of biosafety, but considering the fact that they splashed down in the ocean, and there was no way to fully contain all the dust from the vehicles and the suits the astronauts wore, it was mostly cosmetic.

Somebody else who thought about Spinal Tap?

[Mxyzptlk]

Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and -
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
Nigel Tufnel: [Pause] These go to eleven.

Plum Island Not A Problem... The Nuc Plant next

[Anonymous Coward]

door ( in CT ) will be used to eliminate any biohazard that might get away...

Reminds me of idiot Actors picketing the NUC plant in boats no less when the worst thing in the area is the biohazard plant...

Alien:Resurrection Should Have Been BSL-5

[Vagary]

Remote teleoperation only; no on-site human presence allowed. No material, organic or otherwise, may ever leave the facility.

The facility in Aliens: Resurrection should have been BSL-5, but because the CDC hadn't updated its biosafety criteria in hundreds of years, they mistakenly think that BSL-4 is good enough. If the hatched Aliens were put in little pods out in space and poked at only by robots, all their acid tricks would have got them is a whole lotta vacuum.

And yeah, it does just exterminate the species, but that's why it needs to be studied: so we can figure out how to make it stop.

Lyme, Gulf War Syndrome, and HIV...

[qtp]

The Connecticut town of Lyme (Old Lyme, and East Lyme as well) is less than ten miles away accross the Long Island Sound from Plum Island (If you were ever in the Navy and pulled out from New London or the Groton Sub Base, then youve been within 150 yardsof the place).

Mycoplasma Fermentans has been detected in patients of Gulf War Syndrome, Lyme Disease, and HIV in almost all cases. It is often also detected in Multiple Sclerosis patients, and the US Army released instructions to the Veterans Administration shortly after the Korean War that all MS cases developing within two years of a serviceman returning from Korea should be considered to be service related.

There is a connection that has been noticed by doctors in that area, as well as by doctors treating patients who have lived in that area in other locations.

There is also at least one patent held by the US Army for this organism.

It's good that there's covertage of some of the mishaps that occur at these facilities, but it seems that a "mishap" might not be enough to account for the problems that have been connected to the communitioes surrounding Plum Island and are spreading through the population. (Yes, Gulf War Syndrome is contagious, and did "originate" in many veterans who never left the states.)

Terraserver view of the island

[Tom in Boston]

Here's a Terraserver view of the island. I don't see anything dangerous! Well, nothing bigger than 1 meter, anyway.

FUD about origins of virii?

[djdanlib]

Read on past this rant if you can.

# begin rant # Seems to me like this guy likes to take the sensationalist approach more than the straight facts approach, and shock us out of our right minds. But that's to be expected from a human author. # end rant #

Did anyone else read this and get the impression that he wanted us to think that these horrible, awful scourge-of-mankind diseases ORIGINATED from this facility? I'll post about the origins of two big names he drops here.

Lyme Disease is actually named after a town in Connecticut where it was first documented in the 1970s. That town's name? Old Lyme. I go there every year for a vacation, so I know about it very well. It spreads to humans by ticks - exactly the kind of thing you'd expect Plum to have inside. However, it is easily treated, has a decent grace period before complications occur, and is not debilitating until it gets really bad. You can read more about it here. If this easily curable disease was indeed the result of an experiment at Plum Island, then it was probably the crappiest and least effective bioweapon ever invented.

Now, about West Nile Virus. According to this document: Unless new information comes to light, the first case of West Nile virus to be subjected to scientific study was brought to medical attention in December 1937 at Omogo, West Nile district, Northern Province of Uganda. That case (and the subsequent viral characterization process) was documented by members of the Yellow Fever Research Institute, Entebbe, Uganda in 1940. I seriously doubt they created West Nile in a laboratory that long ago.

The Plum Island laboratory (Link 1 Link 2 got any more links?) has been around plenty longer than Lyme Disease has been known according to this document, but it is newer than West Nile. Directly copied from that site: In 1946, a disease laboratory was built at Fort Terry by the government. Fort Terry was closed in 1948 because we were no longer at war, and it was no longer needed. Fort Terry was reopened to research new ways to go to war, and for the development of chemicals to kill animals.

Draw your own conclusion, here's your sketch pencil.

Interview on WNYC

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's an interview with Michael Carroll archived at http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/03032004 RealPlayer is the format, I think.

"He thinks that there might even be a link between Plum Island research and outbreaks of Lyme disease and the West Nile virus."

It doesn't matter that they 'only' study animal diseases, these diseases can easily jump the species barrier. A few recent examples are SARS and the various flus.

And a website for Carroll's book: www.lab257.com

Information wants to be free

[canineK9]

Part of the quoted article chastises the publication of academic research on these zoonotic pathogens. There was a consensus agreement drawn up by the biomedical Publishing organizations that put a limit on what kind of research should be published if it concerned potential bioterror research. (http://www.asm.org/Media/index.asp?bid=15031). It's not perfect but does not trash the US 1st amendment rights nor give license to terrorists.

calculus

[Anonymous Coward]

imagine you are a head of state

your picture of the world comes from Rush Limbaugh, FOX news, Anne Coulter, etc.

you know only the following:

1. minions of satan are going to kill many of your citizens, and you have to do X to stop them
2. the media, the other political party, most foreigners, and many of your own citizens are commie mutant traitors who want satan to win
3. a small bioterror attack in your country will kill relatively few of your citizens, and anger the rest enough to want revenge, allowing you to do X (whatever that is)

what do you decide?

seriously, imagine this is the only data you had, and you really believed it?

the problem isn't just dumbass politicos, it's ambitious, conscienceless ideologues and politicos who Believe and Know and then figure that excuses them from thinking

Read this carefully

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not the lab you are looking for.

Move along.

Agent Smith

OT, but it was a good book

[Hecatonchires]

Plum Island, and its sequel The Lions Game were great reads. Is there a sequel to Lions Game yet?

and to think...

[kendoka]

that the only thing that stood between us and 12 monkeys was a couple of rolls of duct tape...

maybe infective?

[rbird76]

The poster probably meant infective - not alive but having the capacity to become active if conditions are correct (if people or other vectors are present, etc.). Viruses can be sensitive to UV light and chemical agents since they don't have a cell wall or lots of enzyme systems to protect themselves from the effects of light or chemicals. Weaponizing viruses is probably a lot harder than weaponizing bacteria because viruses don't normally last long outside of a host, so they either have to be made more durable or more infective - likely the former.

The book in the parent post is interesting and scary. I don't know if I believe all of it, but it wouldn't take much of it to be true to be a whole lot more frightening than Plum Island. Some of the material (about chimera viruses, for example) is supposed to be in the open literature, so it may be verifiable, but I haven't tried.

BU?

[Civil_Disobedient]

One propsed for Boston University

Are you serious? Where in the hell would they put it? BU's security is ludicrously lax... I recall fondly that even after they closed off their law building (too many jumpers) you can still easily get on the roof for a nice view of the city.

Or would they build a new facility like they did with the Photonic lab? Now that's a cool building.

Generators?

[Zeromous]

Umm who needs fear when you have diesel power?

Diesel generators have long played a part in many a disaster recovery (and prevention) scheme.

Interesting argument based on suspicions, but...

[fortheloveofjava]

To sum up this article, Plum Island is mysterious, and it scares the daylights out of the author, especially since the strike.

To shore up this sense of dread, the author asserts that two events convince him that Plum Island is more dangerous than people commonly know:

Assertion 1: The first appearance of what we now call Lyme disease [was] a mere 13 miles Northeast of Plum Island.

Fact 1: The first record of a condition associated with Lyme disease dates back to 1883 in Breslau, Germany, where a physician named Alfred Buchwald described a degenerative skin disorder now known as acrodermatitis chronica atrophicans (ACA). (Lyme Disease Foundation).

Assertion 2: West Nile Virus made its first appearance near or around Plum Island.

Fact 2: In 1999 the radius of infection centered around New York City. West Nile Virus is very common virus (according to the CDC, it has been found in West Nile virus has been described in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, west and central Asia, Oceania (subtype Kunjin), and most recently, North America), that could easily been carried by any visitor to one of the world's most populated cities.

Assertion 3: Placing quotes around the word "coincidental" makes it sound conspiratorial.

Fact 3: It does make it sound conspiratorial, but it doesn't make it true.

Honestly, the fact the author was so frightened by the predictable rumors of frightened workers sealing rooms with duct tape (any biology student will tell you that would be useless against airborne pathogens) the he felt he had no choice but to "pack up the car, score some weed, [and] picked up my girlfriend and head to the Jersey Shore ... wait for the imminent human die-off" shows me that the author is deeply paranoid and alarmist (too much weed, Alan?).

Maybe Plum Island leaked some kind of strange stupidity virus?

Great location for those labs, huh?

[DrMorpheus]

Geez, if something goes wrong, like it almost did in this story. Then there's a HUGH population center not very far away. Oh, and plenty of handy vectors, birds as you mention, there to help sprend the nasties.

Hmmm, something doesn't seem quite right about this scenario. Can't put my finger on it, though.

Why can't they locate them out in the middle of the desert like in the "Andromeda Strain"? Then, if something goes wrong there's a much, much smaller chance that some horrible nasties don't get spread to the general population.

What the fuck were these people thinking?!

Love the (il)logic working here.

[DrMorpheus]

Let's see, further inland from Galveston, lets trade the threat of a hurricane for the threat of a class 5 tornado. hurricane ... tornado... hurricane ... tornado. OK lets move it to California. hurricane ... earthquake ... hurricane. These facilities are never going to be 100% safe.

Yup, since we can't make it 100% safe there's no point in trying to make it safer than it currently is. That IS what your arguing, you know.

Re:Must be all Americans on drugs perhaps?

[FoxMcCloud]

Mh... 3 comments in a row posted with the clear intent of ridiculing Americans, including two from (supposedly) Americans. Does everyone hate them so much? :-P

The "Monkey House" was torn down

[JohnQPublic]

I live in Reston, just a few miles from the imfamous "Monkey House". Or, at least, I did, up until a few years ago. It was fun to watch the construction folks in bunny suits through the windows as they removed everything in the place and did HAZMAT transport to who-knows-where. When they were done, they razed the building and took the top few feet of soil from the entire site with them.

Then they built a new building. It currently houses a printing shop (ala Kinko's but smaller), and a neo-fundamentalist Christian church. Said church, like many others, shares its facilities with a pre-school child care operation during the week.

And there's been another pre-school about 25 feet away from the site for as long as I can remember.