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

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?

[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.

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

[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:Scary..

[Servo]

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

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.

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?

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: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: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.

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.

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: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: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: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.

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.