The spill form cautions its reader "NOTE: This bldg. was UNMANNED for 32 hrs." Under the old way of doing things, it would have been manned — the overnight shift would have worked overtime on the island through the next day and ridden out the storm. Of course, it would have cost more money than running Building 102 at one 10-hour shift per day. Joe observes, "See, the contractor said, 'We need more money to pay for more men.' The government said, 'We're not paying you any more money,' and the contractor said, 'If you're not paying us, we're not putting operators in there twenty-four hours and you're going to have another spill.' " At this time, the contractor's vice president of operations told a reporter that safety on Plum Island was "really governed by the client," and his client — the USDA — was under "very serious budget constraints." Another executive privately admitted exactly where his company stood, saying, "We can't staff the facility to the level we'd like to."
This round-robin routine is a prime example of why certain government functions at Plum Island should be kept in federal hands, and ought not be privatized.
TURTLES AND GEESE
After exiting Building 102, effluent travels to the nearby wastewater treatment plant, which uses a process called activated sludge. It enters a pond at about 150 degrees (assuming Building 102 is functioning properly), and aerators froth the fluid up like a bubbly hot tub. The hard stuff drops to the bottom and a set of six-foot-long weirs skim the "cream" off the top and push it into a clarifier, where more settling takes place. The bacteria are routed back into the aeration tank, and the remaining cream goes under a set of ultraviolet photochemical radiation lamps before being pumped into Plum Island Harbor, which empties into Plum Gut, whose waters disperse north into the Long Island Sound, and south to the Hamptons. The cream used to be chlorinated, but was replaced with UV lights to cut costs.[45]
The most troubling part of this whole process is found at the end of the pipe. Despite the particularly hazardous content of the Plum Island waste-water treatment plant's outfall, it is tested monthly, no different than any other municipal sewage plant. Following New York State and EPA laws, Plum Island tests for suspended solids and coliforms. Coliforms are harmless bacteria, not normally in water, but found in warm-blooded mammals. The presence of fecal coliform bacteria in the water is a bellwether for other microbes; that is, it indicates that the water contains many other bacteria and viruses not being tested, including harmful disease-causing germs. When traced back to a municipal sewage plant, this means the water is transmitting typhoid fever, diphtheria, hepatitis, dysentery, gastroenteritis, or other domestic virus and bacteria infections. High levels of fecal col-iform out of the exotic animal germ labs on Plum Island present a unique and highly dangerous situation.
For water to be acceptable for swimming, it should have fewer than 200 colonies of coliforms per 100 milliliters of water sampled; fewer than 1,000 colonies are acceptable for fishing and boating.[46] Plum Island's legally permissible limit is 700 colonies per day. Required by law to be tested once a month, Plum Island's coliform levels were above that limit for seven months during a twelve-month span between 1996 and 1997. In October 1996 and March 1997, the levels tested at 900 colonies, well over acceptable standards for swimming in the waters of the Hamptons, America's elite summer playground. But that was the best of it. Other monthly counts ranged from 1,000 to 6,000. And during one fateful month, February 1997, Plum Island spewed out an enormous 23,000 colonies per 100 milliliters sampled—115 times higher than the acceptable limit for swimming, 33 times higher than the island's legally permissible limit, and 23 times higher than the fishing and boating limit. Additional documents show this was not a fluke. Back in 1990 and 1991, Plum Island's fecal coliform counts held steady in the 2,000 range — three times the legal limit — and peaked to a shocking 20,000 during four separate monthly testing periods. Plum Island has been — and still is — flushing deadly exotic animal viruses along with the standard typhoid and diphtheria germs into coastal waters enjoyed by millions of people.
In 1999, hundreds of thousands of lobsters in Long Island Sound mysteriously died, causing the New York-Connecticut lobster harvest to fall off virtually 100 percent that year. The die-off, which ended New York's reign as the nation's second largest lobster-producing state (behind only Maine), prompted the federal government to declare the event a "marine resource disaster." Researchers pinpointed a parasitic paramoeba that kills off nerve tissue and a bacterial infection that causes "shell disease" as culprits, as well as large amounts of malathion from the 1999 West Nile virus pesticide sprayings seeping into the Long Island Sound. Surprisingly, no scientific efforts have been made to study the link between the two microbes and the fouled sewage flowing out of Plum Island.
Dr. Floyd Horn, the official in charge of all USDA research, said in 1998, "We're not polluting the sound in any way. We heat the discharge to sterilize it and it goes into a treatment plant before it goes into the sound." But one employee extensively involved with the process has a different response. "That stuff wasn't killed off in the old system, and I'm not sure it's killed off in the new system." When the New York Observer questioned Dr. Jerry Crawford about the high levels of fecal coliform, he answered, "The location where the samples are taken has a tremendous number of turtles and geese…. They shit in the aeration pond… the shit has E. coli in it. Normal sewage treatment plants don't have animals."
Building 102 and the Plum Island wastewater treatment plant are not performing their critical functions. Instead, they pump thousands of gallons of virus- and bacteria-contaminated waste into the water. Consider this: a single bacterium that replicates itself in twenty minutes will be, within twelve hours, the parent of 16,777,216 new offspring. And that's just a single germ out of billions and billions that make their way out of Plum Island each day.
PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE
After the EPA came down on Plum Island, an environmental company came over and drilled a number of monitoring wells twenty feet down in which it installed a pipe with a cap. Every month, "Steve Bosley" totes his collecting buckets and portable pump from well to well, unscrewing each cap and carefully snaking clear tubing about sixteen feet down each pipe. He then switches on the pump — "p-p-p-p-p-p-p " — which brings up what's been accumulating way below the island's surface. "I'm still pulling oil out of the wells," Steve tells me. "I'm supposed to pull the sample until I run clear water. I've been running about four and a half gallons of No. 2 and No. 6 oil before I run clear water." The No. 2 oil oozing out of Plum Island's sandy underground is essentially diesel engine fuel; the No. 6 oil has the viscosity of tar. "Yes, I would say it runs pure oil for four gallons, then it turns creamy, then to white, then to swamp gas, then almost clear."
Steve surmises, "We've had a bunch of busted pipes and leaking tanks. The oil must have permeated the whole ground." He isn't exaggerating. A 1992 internal USDA memorandum from the assistant secretary of agriculture notes "Over 40 underground storage tanks…. Most of these tanks are probably at least 30 years old. While tests of the drinking water have not indicated any problems to date, this could change overnight." The memo urged action "as soon as possible," but seven years later, nothing's changed. The oil pockets below Plum Island coexist with pockets of clay and sand, as well as aquifers, or vast pockets of fresh water from which people obtain their drinking water through fourteen shallow wells. The aquifers, and other liquids like oil, do not remain fixed in one place. They move and often merge, according to geology experts. One drop of oil, dabbed on a blade of grass in the center of Long Island, will travel south and reach the Atlantic Ocean within twenty-five years. The pockets of oil Steve pumps from a well that's sampling only a tiny portion will do the same thing. "That oil, in my opinion, is going to take the path of least resistance, go through the sand to the potable water," says Steve.
45
The jury is still out on which method of final treatment, chlorine or UV radiation, is preferable. While chlorine is considered highly toxic to marine life, UV radiation may not be inactivating all of the billions of viruses and bacteria contained in sewage. UV is far cheaper than using chlorine, which must be replenished regularly.
46
These are generous thresholds. Vermont, for example, sets 77 colonies of fecal coliform as that state's acceptable maximum level for swimming.