Enter Dr. Claude G. "Jerry" Crawford. Breeze's moves to divide and conquer Plum Island had met with plenty of controversy and criticism; he had somehow earned a reprieve from this next fiasco, the Plum Island Workers' Rebellion. Washington granted him cover in the form of the forty-nine-year-old Jerry Crawford, a USDA career man previously working in Peoria, Illinois, whose specialty was crop seeds. Many suspected an ulterior motive for giving Crawford the newly created position of deputy area director, or "DAD," as he was known in correspondence (and referred to derisively by the workforce). The plan was to have Breeze do research full time, while letting DAD "run the buildings" — another way of saying "take the flak."
Ed Hollreiser remembers Crawford's first day on Plum Island. "When he came in, he gave this big speech to all of us, where he explained his whole background, and how it was on plant research, and how it had nothing to do with animal research. Then he discussed the vacations he took to Europe with his wife. Meanwhile, half of us are about to lose our jobs." Crawford was a master of malapropism. When asked about cost overruns, he said, "There are no golden toilet seats on Plum Island." Asked about all the safety problems under Dr. Breeze, he said, "We don't search handbags or strip search. I believe we can show [security] is warranted for the type of research we do here. We're not making nuclear bombs." And when asked about the OSHA violations, he noted it took six months for the safety agency to issue the violations and said, "If these violations had been life-threatening or extremely hazardous to employee safety, one would think OSHA would have done something immediately." Then realizing what he had said, Crawford added, "Uh, I don't mean to say these violations are not important…. " Finally, when asked about the consequences of an employee's refusing experimental, non-FDA-approved vaccines, "We will try to find another position. If we don't have one, they will be terminated. Simple as that."
When it came to public relations — ostensibly the reason he was on Plum Island — a running joke was that Crawford himself had been infected by the virus that caused foot-in-mouth disease. One top Breeze administration official said, "We all independently formed our own opinion of Crawford's capabilities in a relatively short period of time, and realized the man was a complete fool."
Dr. Breeze, spared this particular media feeding frenzy, says the media issues were handled terribly. "It was very reactive." Another adjective he uses is "comical." In fact, John Boyle recalls Breeze "sitting in the bleachers, laughing his ass off on that one."[44] Within the next year, the USDA transferred Dr. Crawford to a position near Washington. On his way out, he told a local reporter, "My goal, by opening the island up to the press, was to show the people that we were good neighbors."
RAW SEWAGE, RECYCLED
"If you flush it or drink it, it comes to me."
"Joe Zeliff" worked in Building 102, the wastewater decontamination chamber for Lab 101, known to those on the inside as "The Big Shithouse" (Lab 257's chamber was the "Little" one). One of Joe's responsibilities included pulling liquid samples from the sewage tanks after they went through the decon process — that is, after the goo had snaked through a series of tubes that heated it up to 214 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour. The samples were handed over to the safety officers, who would inject them into test animals to ensure that systems in Building 102 were operating correctly. It was crude safety, but it worked.
For years, Joe would prepare a safety sample each Thursday morning. He doesn't pull samples now. "We haven't done that, well, since Breeze came in," Joe says. Now, Joe has no idea whether the liquid waste coming out of Building 102 is alive or dead.
"They've recently added new gauges, but I don't think even those gauges read right." Sometimes the low temperature alarm rings at 203 degrees Fahrenheit on the new system; other times it goes off at 198 degrees, and still other times it buzzes at 206 degrees, the temperature which is supposed to set it off. Sometimes he doesn't get a low temperature alarm, like the one time he realized too late that the heat exchangers had failed and the sewage went through cold. The old system had ten tiny heat probes inside the booster, heat exchange, and retention tubes that relayed the temperatures within up to the control panel. The new system only has two temperature readings: going in and coming out.
When Joe and other operators in Building 102 hear the low temperature alarm, they are first supposed to shut the system down. Then they gradually bring it back up to 214 degrees, and only then do they restart the pumps. But it doesn't work that way. Why not? "Because frankly, it's a pain in the ass — you'd be shutting the entire system down every single day, every fifteen minutes. It's not that the operators don't want to do it. It's just that the gauges malfunction constantly." The tanks, including the 27,000-gallon main tank ("You could honestly get lost inside it," says Joe. "It's the size of my house") have large cold spots, like when one swims in a warm lake and hits a chilly pocket of water. In these cold slugs, billions of viruses and bacteria stay alive through the contaminated sewage treatment.
A February 1993 incident form noted a "critical alarm sewage spill" in Building 102. Joe remembers, "I was directly involved with this." Since the building opened in 1956, the plant had always run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But the private contractor ran it only ten hours a day. "The collection process will be unattended, with 100 percent reliance upon the automatic and emergency collection equipments," stated an internal USDA letter on this decision. "They did it to save money," says Joe, shaking his head in disgust. "What else?"
One winter night, an operator left his shift after recording the 27,000-gallon No. 2 tank as only 7,000 gallons full. High winds and rough sea conditions prevented the next shift from getting to the island the following day, so it remained unattended. When the weather finally calmed, the shift operator opened the door to Building 102 and came upon a putrid smell — something had gone terribly wrong in the tank area. A single 1,000-pound cow excretes from 75 to 115 pounds of manure a day, and a single 200-pound pig, 35 to 65 pounds; it isn't hard to see how quickly raw, infected sewage accumulates on Plum Island each day. Second only to the incinerator charging room, Building 102 is the biologically "hottest" area, and is therefore kept painstakingly clean. On a normal day, "that building is as clean as a whistle," says Joe. "It is cleaner than my house — you could eat off the floor in there." But that morning, the operator and his assistant, who came upon the large pool of gushing brown mess, were gagging within seconds for clean air. "I saw nothing but shit all over the place," says the operator. "Raw, no decontamination, viruses and who knows what — everywhere." The men witnessed a macabre sight: a continuous flow of contaminated sewage, vomiting out of the overflow valve, after being pumped from the No. 2 tank, through a daisy chain of pipes. Underneath the pool of sewage, fluid was emptying into the floor drains, where sump pumps sent it back into the No. 2 tank; from there, it cycled through again. "We were essentially recycling raw sewage," says Joe. First, the men processed some contaminated sewage out to make room in the tanks. Then, donning Tyvek protective jumpsuits, hip boots, and face respirators, they drained and mopped up the mess, flushing the room down with Roccal solution. Research in Lab 101 seized up for two days. "They couldn't so much as flush a toilet in 101, because we couldn't handle it in 102."
44
Realizing the dearth of Crawford's PR savvy, USDA headquarters begged Breeze to speak to a