"When he took me off my job and put me down in that basement," says Fran, "it just felt humiliating." Barely finished with bagging the shredded records, she was transferred again, to the telephone switchboard in the guardhouse. While trying her best to handle her new responsibility over the next two months, Fran became gradually lethargic and had to be hospitalized. Her doctor diagnosed her with bilateral severe maxillary sinusitis.
She was unsure of the cause of that condition — the otherwise healthy Fran had never before felt tightness in her chest and sinus pain — until a scientist checking in with her after her hospital stay put his finger on it. Unknowingly, Fran had been inhaling insidious formaldehyde vapors seeping into the switchboard room. When notified of this, Plum Island's brass had the solution. She was transferred to the rusted, corrugated steel warehouse at the harbor, to chug around on a grimy forklift and record inventory. Physically weakened and mentally drained from the abuse, Fran Demorest quit her job ("I took my retirement," she prefers to say with pride). She wasn't surprised by the antics — she had predicted them when she wrote her letter.
"Fran needed to be fired because you couldn't change her," remembers John Boyle. "Fired or transferred into some other job where she wasn't involved in everybody's business — I think we eliminated her job. I'm not certain."
And, thought Breeze and his minions, that was one less voice they had to contend with from the Plum Island peanut gallery.
THE BROKEN PACT
For decades, little was known about Plum Island, owing in large part to the blind loyalty of those who worked there. The initial tumult over the USDA's "choice" of Plum Island had long ago faded from memory. The three hundred strong, locally hired workforce put bread on many a table on the bucolic North Fork, increasingly hampered by an evaporating rural economy in need of jobs with good pay, security, and retirement benefits. A close-knit Plum Island family grew, strengthened by the ferry ride each morning, like children riding to school together on a big yellow bus. Employees' children — children of scientists, secretaries, and steamfitters — went to east end schools together and played sports together. Workers — of both white- and blue-collar extraction — went fishing together, and barbe-qued together on the weekends. If you didn't work on Plum Island, chances were two or three of your friends or neighbors did. An unspoken pact evolved, an implicit bond between the Plum Island workforce and the brass: attacking Plum Island wouldn't be attacking your place of work — it would bring shame upon your family. Better to be tight-lipped about our Plum Island, went the thinking, because the press and general public doesn't understand us and always discredits us, and makes us look bad— and that's not good for business. That's not good for our family. "It was a great-paying job with great benefits," said one worker, "when others around here were digging clams and planting potatoes — so we kept it quiet. And management basically said to us: 'We'll keep this place safe, you keep your mouth shut, and we'll take care of you.' "
But many now felt that Dr. Roger Breeze had shredded, like with Central Files, that pact of loyalty, stuffed it in a big black bag, and sent it to the incinerator. And unlike a typical corporate downsizing, here the employees knew the downsizing and vile treatment were preventable, had the director really cared about them or the nature of the work being performed.
Dr. Breeze would pay the price for his disloyalty. The floodgates opened and revelations poured forth. Federal agencies started receiving an unprecedented number of anonymous phone calls about the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. So did the major newspapers, and the television stations. The Federal Office of Special Counsel, which runs the toll-free whistleblower program, received more anonymous tips about Plum Island than about any other federal facility in the nation.
Workers called the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington, D.C., and told them about large sewage spills and massive landfills and Army bunkers filled with drums of hazardous chemicals. They reported leaking underground oil tanks, a sewage plant that didn't work properly, and a faulty wastewater treatment plant that dumped untested sewage into Long Island Sound. They told them fellow workers were ordered to toss unmarked plastic bottles and Clorox bottles filled with unknown liquid chemicals into the incinerators. Workers were told to run the incinerators only when the winds blew due east, out toward the Atlantic Ocean, to avoid mainland detection of noxious emission clouds.
An incredulous EPA came out to Plum Island to investigate the claims. They couldn't believe their eyes. They came upon dump sites and bunkers stuffed with scores of rusting (and ruptured) metal drums containing solvents, oils, ethylene oxide, creosote, hydrochloric acid, and paraformalde-hyde, and still more drums that contained unknowns. They toured the wastewater treatment plant and found it out of service, along with effluent that wasn't chlorinated to kill germs and a storm pipe that ran straight into the sound without going through treatment. The EPA then witnessed thick black smoke billowing out of the Lab 101 incinerator, and asked for samples of the ash to test for toxic content.
The EPA cited Plum Island for multiple violations of the Clean Water Act and environmental laws prohibiting the storage of hazardous materials. Threatened with legal action, the USDA agreed to stop polluting, and to spend $150,000 on remediation efforts.
The USDA knew for years about these environmental conditions and that they might come to light one day. A letter by the assistant secretary of agriculture, dated years before the EPA investigation, noted Plum Island's "improper handling of asbestos-containing material [forty thousand pounds worth], sanitary landfills in violation of state standards, and improper management of hazardous wastes." But they never told the EPA. Dissatisfied with Plum Island's snail-paced remediation progress, the EPA brought legal action against the USDA, seeking $111,000 in civil penalties for the environmental and hazardous waste law violations. Years after the action was brought, much of the waste still remained. Again, the EPA charged the USDA with violating federal environmental laws. In 1999, the USDA agreed to pay $32,500 in fines (a fraction of the earlier fine) and promised, once again, not to violate laws protecting the environment.
Whistleblowers also called the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), telling them about employees becoming strangely ill from exposure to unknown animal viruses and bacteria. OSHA learned about the lack of a biological workplace safety program, and of inconsistent vaccine programs. The agency also learned about radioactive isotopes being handled without monitors and protective equipment, locked emergency exit doors, and about the professional fire department being replaced with an unqualified volunteer bucket brigade.