OSHA was far less skeptical about problems at Plum Island than the EPA. Plum Island had made OSHA's "High Hazard List" of unsafe workplaces back in 1988, when workers' compensation claims on the island were found to be triple the national average. Investigating the island, OSHA inspectors quickly discovered exposed electrical cables, shoddy electric outlets, open incinerator pits, untested fire alarms, expired fire extinguishers, locked emergency exit doors, unmarked hot water pipes, and workers bitten and trampled by animals. OSHA cited the USDA for no less than 139 workplace safety violations. When asked by a local newspaper about the violations, Dr. Breeze explained that $50,000 would be redirected from important road-sealing and building painting projects to correct the OSHA safety violations. The money would not be coming out of scientific funds, he said, including those earmarked for new equipment, the fleet of bikes, or the scientists' exercise gym.
On national average, OSHA on-site inspections occur about once every eighty years. But OSHA returned to Plum Island five years later. This time around, OSHA not only found many of the previous violations uncorrected, they also encountered numerous new violations: no emergency procedures or safety training for handling ethanol, formaldehyde, or radioactive compounds like Cobalt-60; disposal of used virus syringes in penetrable containers; no vaccinations for employees; improper storage of compressed gas cylinders; unlabeled and mislabeled hazardous chemical containers; no protection against carcinogen exposure; and no safety training for handling blood-borne virus and bacterial pathogens. OSHA apportioned the blame for the 124 new violations between the USDA and private contractor Burns & Roe. Of those, Plum Island was cited with 67 "Serious" violations, those which can lead directly to death or serious injury. Burns & Roe was ordered to pay $54,375 in punitive fines; those costs were ultimately borne by their client, the U.S. government. As a repeat offender, the USDA should have warranted — at the very least — a heavy fine. Yet because it was a sister government agency, OSHA could not legally fine or shut down Plum Island, like it would any private business. Instead, the USDA's entire penalty for 67 potentially fatal safety violations — an immense 263 violations overall — was a letter listing the violations sent to the secretary of agriculture's office.
When asked about the OSHA violations, Dr. Breeze scoffs. "The OSHA thing is a rat to me, I think. What does it really mean? The exit sign needs to be above the door, there isn't a sign warning this or that. When people think of OSHA, they think of small children next to rotating circular saw blades or furnaces, but it's usually not like that. It's like a vehicle inspection — people find bits and pieces and they need to get things changed, but they're not structurally very important."
Though the USDA's fellow government agencies investigated Plum Island and meted out punishments, nearly all of it was deflected. After all, Plum Island was not a private company that could be closed — neither the EPA nor OSHA had the authority to shut down the USDA. So a harsh reality ruled on Plum Island. The federal government was brazenly ignoring its own laws.
If the first round of whistleblowing was limited in its effectiveness, the second round held great potential. Current and former employees called every media outlet they could think of. They told reporters about herds of deer roaming the island, and a doe and her two fawns being gunned down by soldiers in Army Blackhawk helicopters, and about an employee who caught Nairobi sheep disease.
A media siege erupted. CNN and ABC, Newsday and the New York Times, national and local reporters all bombarded Plum Island for information on the allegations. Their faces blurred and voices distorted, workers sat before television cameras and told what they knew.
CNN ran a report with footage of Pete Swenson, a former Plum Island safety technician who left the area in disgust and moved to Virginia. Seated next to his wife at his kitchen table, the stocky, middle-aged Swenson told a harrowing tale. Outdoors he had been bitten on the leg by a horsefly and scratched the bite, thinking nothing of it. He entered Lab 257 to decontaminate a room that held animals infected with Nairobi sheep disease. Days later, his leg swelled and ulcerated, and he developed severe flulike symptoms. His illness got so bad he checked into the Long Island Veterans' Hospital. Swen-son told the attending doctor where he worked and that he suspected he had contracted Nairobi sheep disease, at which point a foreign disease specialist was brought in. According to Swenson, the specialist told him, "That disease is not here in the U.S. — I'm not sure how you could have it." Swenson recovered, but not without a memento for his troubles: CNN cameras focused on an oval-shaped scar about two inches wide, burnished deep into in the middle of his left calf. When reporters asked Dr. Jerry Crawford (a new Plum Island official handling the media) if Swenson had been infected, he replied, "Probably, no." Possibly, they asked? "Possibly — yes. Some of the diseases — humans can catch a form of it, and get flulike symptoms."
Two stories involved more disturbing occurrences. In the winter of 1992, three cardboard boxes filled with biological samples blew off the back of the ferry into heavy seas. An emergency call went over the radio that morning, and a special boat crew was called to duty. A captain and two able-bodied seamen plowed back and forth through Plum Gut, and then around Plum Island's perimeter, looking for the missing cargo. An island official called off the search after only a few runs. The three boxes were never recovered. Three employees confirm the accident. "What if it didn't sink?" says one of them, shaking his head. "What if some kid hooked it on his fishing pole? What if it floated to a beach in Southampton, or Sag Harbor, or Montauk?" The germs were taken away by the currents, bobbing up and down inside a Styrofoam cushion inside a cardboard box. But management didn't seem too concerned. " 'Nah, don't worry about it,' they said to us—'Don't worry about it.' "
The second most damning incident had scores of dead birds lying outside Laboratory 101. This allegation had a document written by Dr. Breeze that went along with it:
Concerns have been raised about dead seagulls in the [Lab] 101 light court. The most recently dead bird was frozen by [Burns & Roe] and has been passed to [Lab 257] for pathological examination…. I would ask that [Lab 257] confirm that infectious agents used in [Labs] 101 and 257 are not avian [bird] pathogens…[and] report on postmortem findings in this bird.
"Seagulls used to land on the 101 roof all the time, with no problem," says one employee. "We have contractors building all over the place, including on top of the roof. Then, all of a sudden, these birds are dying, and they didn't attribute it to anything." Fearing a problem, a contractor presented one of the birds to Dr. Breeze with a memorandum for the record. "It's the fox watching the chicken coop," the employee says of Plum Island's self-analysis of a biological containment leak. "Take the seagulls and bring them to someone who doesn't have an agenda." Asked about the event, a USDA official said, "The veterinary pathologists on Plum Island are about the best around. They'll find out what killed the birds." Under the Freedom of Information Act, a request was made for the results of the "postmortem findings" on the nine birds reputedly autopsied (sources indicate there were many more dead birds). As of this writing, the USDA has refused to respond.
When the gaggle of news reporters first learned of Plum Island's many woes from the disgruntled mob, they turned to the island's director for answers. Dr. Roger Breeze told the New York Times they had the wrong guy. "I'm not responsible for the operation of the support services and facilities at Plum Island," he told them. As one knowledgeable source says, "Breeze had thought, 'Whoa, wait a second here — I did all this work for USDA, got this lab built in four years when they couldn't over the last twenty-five, and now I'm taking the heat?' And that is when they brought in Crawford. He was the fall guy to take the flak."