THE GRAVY TRAIN
One of the ways Dr. Breeze kept his prized scientific recruits happy was through special nonsalary compensation. For example, during overnights and weekends, a scientist would be stationed on the island as a duty officer to respond to animal or human emergencies. During the Callis era, duty officers were paid $60 for a weeknight and $160 for the weekend. "Basically, if there was a problem in the lab, you had to go in there, turn off a centrifuge, move stuff from a freezer or drop feed down the chute to the critters [test animals]," explains Dr. Carol House. But under Breeze, new scientists were assigned duty officer shifts and paid "some $600 to $700 a weekend to get in on the gravy train," says one scientist. The role went from being the most dreaded to the most coveted.
"Danny Clewis" remembers a problem that occurred in Lab 257. Around 2:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, an alarm rang in the control room: the Box 6 freezer had gone down. As one of the overnight building operators, Danny went into the containment corridor to check on Box 6, and found the compressor shot and the freezer all but cooked. Normally stored at minus 158 degrees Fahrenheit, biologicals have to be shifted from the broken icebox into other freezers quickly or the germs will start to get pesky. Danny phoned the duty officer and told him Box 6 was out. "Well, he got very ornery with me," says Danny, describing the reaction on the other end of the line. "He didn't want to come down to assess the situation. He yelled at me that I woke him up and told me to do it myself." Tact isn't one of Danny Clewis's strong points, because he shot back, "Listen, buddy, this is your responsibility, not ours — and you're messing with the wrong guy." He was right. Operating the building's negative airflow systems and steam plant was Danny's domain, but when it came to viruses and germs, they all looked the same to him.
The duty officer then asked, "Well, what do we usually do in this situation?"
" 'What do we do?' I asked him back." "What I do is usually call you — the duty officer, for Christ's sake!"
The duty officer slogged down to Lab 257, and the two of them began unloading the contents of Box 6 to transfer them into other freezers. But it wasn't all that easy. "We had biologicals in that freezer that were frozen and dated in the 1950s," Danny recalls. "We opened the door and about half of them fell onto the floor." Luckily, only a few tubes and flasks broke on the tile floor and spilled their contents; a Roccal disinfectant solution was brought in for the kill. The move then faced another obstacle — the other freezers were already overcrowded. One freezer was literally bursting at the seams with germs, so Danny wedged a two- by four-inch beam of plywood between it and a wall to keep its door shut. Each freezer has an attached log that records the exact contents of the materials kept inside. But Danny noticed the duty officer, all hot and bothered from being woken in the first place, haphazardly separating the carefully grouped test tubes and stuffing them into whatever freezer open space he could find. Without logging any of them. "He's the boss," Danny said to himself and shrugged.
Three weeks later, Danny got a phone call. "This one scientist wants to know where everything is, particularly all his samples. How the hell am I supposed to know? I told him to call up the duty officer from that night."
The stories that circulated turned out to be more than grumbles of disgruntled workers. The facts proved that the USDA was grossly negligent, the workforce had looked the other way for years, and the public had been in the dark — in short, it proved that Plum Island was in disgraceful shape. Though some said the disclosures to the EPA, OSHA, and the news media were unwarranted, other workers and scientists believed the door needed to be opened wide. One employee laid his thinking bare when he explained, "You have to understand. If somebody took all this away from you, what would you do? You would be really pissed off and annoyed— you wouldn't take a little revenge? I covered up for these people for years, and it would have cost them millions then. So I — and all the others — blew the whistle." Says the former union leader Ed Hollreiser, "I never had a vendetta to close Plum Island down, but I wanted it run right. The contractor took shortcuts to save money, made more profits, and got lean, but then safety was compromised. Safety doesn't need to be lean — it needs to be fat."
For all the whistleblowers' efforts in bringing these dreadful conditions to light, Plum Island remained — and remains — a real biological and environmental hazard.
12
Meltdown
Look, I'm not a scientist — but to me, it was a biological meltdown.
Friday, August 16, 1991, 12:00 p.m. — A tropical depression formed from a cluster of tightly packed thunderstorms just east of the Bahamas, and it gradually intensified throughout the day and overnight. By late Saturday afternoon, it became a "tropical cyclone with winds that exceed seventy-four miles per hour and circulate counterclockwise about its center," otherwise known as a hurricane. When a storm officially becomes a hurricane, the National Hurricane Center gives it a name. The names are handed out in alphabetical order to delineate how many have come before it that hurricane season; this second hurricane of the season was simply named "Bob." Like many hurricanes originating in this region, Bob plowed north by northeast, following a path parallel to the East Coast of the United States. With each passing hour, the hurricane's intensity accelerated. As Saturday slipped into Sunday, Bob came within 30 miles of Cape Hatteras, packing winds over 115 miles per hour. Minimum barometric pressure was 957 mb. Out of five possible levels, Bob was classified as a Category-3 (CAT-3) hurricane, a storm capable of extensive damage. The hurricane spiraled on, gaining strength as it went.
Saturday, August 17, 6:00 p.m. — Phillip Piegari sat down for dinner with his family in his modest Jamesport, Long Island, home. Jamesport is one of ten tiny hamlets along Route 25, a countrified area dotted with truck farms, vineyards, colonial bed-and-breakfasts, and ubiquitous yard sale signs.
Phillip's wife, Zyta, born and raised in Ecuador, set out a delicious dinner for Phillip and their two young boys, Peter and Matthew, who immediately dug in. Phillip halted their progress by loudly clearing his throat. He then recited a solemn blessing, like he did before every meal.
On this night, however, talk at the dinner table was not the usual chatter about school, weekend fishing plans on their modest boat, or the upcoming family vacation. All talk, and quiet thoughts, centered on the hurricane. The television in the family room was on, blathering faint sounds about the violent storm spiraling up the East Coast, headed straight for Long Island. Because the 118-mile long land mass extends out at a right angle from the coastline, it has forever borne the brunt force of tropical storms that come north and hug the coast. During one recent December nor'easter, for example, the ocean flooded over the Hamptons barrier beach island and met the bay. When it retreated, it gouged two new inlets and over forty million-dollar beachfront homes were destroyed; the road now comes to a screeching halt at a rushing ocean inlet, and then continues on the other side. The Piegaris listened from the kitchen as the nightly news anchors instructed people to board up windows, take fragile items off of shelves, and stand in the frames of doorways when the storm hit. Heeding the warnings, earlier in the day, Phillip took the boat out of the water and picked up large bottles of water. He packed the freezer with extra ice. Zyta pulled her fragile crockery off the shelves.