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

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..

[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: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: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.

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.