The Piegari family was particularly concerned because the hurricane was headed directly for the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Phillip was due to report there in just a few hours for the graveyard shift. For twelve years now, he had been a ferryboat seaman and building maintenance engineer on Plum Island. Phillip had experienced rough weather conditions on the island before; he felt confident he and the men on the late-night shift would see this storm safely through, just like all the others. He assured Zyta and the boys he would be fine and admonished them to stay indoors during the storm.
At forty-four years old, Phillip cut a slight frame at five feet, six inches tall. But his small size and reddish-brown mop-top belied the man on the inside. From 1967 to 1973, Phillip sailed around the globe six times as an able-bodied seaman with the U.S. Merchant Marine, and saw heavy combat action in the Vietnam War. After he returned home, he enlisted in the marine division of the Army Corps of Engineers. Others might shrink from the risk of that night's assignment, but Phillip was hardly afraid. He had a job to do, an important responsibility on Plum Island, and a sacred obligation to provide for his family. To a combat veteran, it was just another day on the job.
Sunday, August 19, 12:00 a.m. — Piegari and the men of B Crew arrived on the island. They were shuttled over on the Plum Isle, one of three government-operated ferries used to transport scientists and staff to and from the facility. Unknown to the passengers, but likely known to the USDA, the old Plum Isle had recently failed a Coast Guard inspection and was not certified to carry passengers. The other two ferries were tied up in safe anchorage at the New London, Connecticut, naval submarine base. Lack of certification notwithstanding, the Plum Isle was the only vessel available to transport workers during the storm. It made the trip over rough waters without incident.
B Crew, three men and a foreman, normally pulled an eight-hour graveyard shift. But unlike previous routine shifts, that night they had to support and maintain Laboratory 257 while a hurricane passed overhead. Piegari recalls the crew's mission early that Sunday: "We were operating the building as usual. We had certain responsibilities. For example, we had to maintain steam in the building. We had a constant flow of water that had to be treated as sewage. We had to regulate and monitor the air pressure in the building, to see that we hold negative pressure biocontainment. We had to monitor the freezers to see they were the proper temperature. We constantly patrolled the building to make sure we weren't losing anything, in the way of our systems."
Upon their arrival, the crew drove along narrow winding dirt trails to Lab 257. Lab 257 was a long, rectangular building with three-foot-thick reinforced concrete walls and a flat, black tar roof. Tiny porthole windows cut into the whitewashed walls and circled near the top of the building every twenty feet. The windows were recessed deep within the building's walls. Little light shined through, for they were caked with the grime and coarse sea salt that had accumulated over eighty years' time. The building was surrounded by a four-foot high cement wall, and a rusted barbed wire fence encircled the compound. Entering the building through the air lock, B Crew was greeted by the shift's first problem — the hot water coil broke. The coil runs on electric power and generates steam for the building. Second in importance only to electricity, steam is an essential resource for the lab's smooth operation; it is needed to heat the building, treat contaminated animal sewage, and produce hot water for decontamination showers. It must constantly be kept on-line. Within a short time, the crew repaired the coil, and steam pressure was restored. The next few hours were relatively quiet.
Sunday, August 18, 7:00 a.m. — Hurricane Bob's tentacles stretched from Maryland's eastern shore of the Chesapeake all the way up to Cape Cod. Storm surges of more than eight feet rocked boats clear off their moorings, knocked down homes along the shoreline, and shaved off fifty feet of coast line. Seas were far beyond navigable. They were awash in choppy white-caps, tall wave crests, and deep troughs.
The storm swirled around the eye of the hurricane, a core about twenty miles wide. Within it, conditions were relatively calm, with a lull in wind velocity. But this brief pause lasted barely long enough for victims to brace themselves for the calamity on the other side of the eye.
Around 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, Bob's eye unpredictably twisted further east, heading straight for Block Island, about twenty-five miles due east of Plum Island.
At this time — with the worst of the storm still yet to come — Lab 257 went dark.
The laboratory's basement held the boilers, sewage treatment plant, and main mechanical room containing air-handling and monitoring equipment to prevent viruses from escaping. The sewage plant "cooked" raw, contaminated wastewater to kill off any live biological agents. On Lab 257's first floor were the laundry and glassware storage rooms, glassware sterilization unit, incinerator, decontamination rooms, and air locks, through which everyone passed in order to enter and exit the lab. It also contained the 120-Area. The 120-Area was the "hottest" part of the building, the site of the most dangerous, infectious virus research. This area was equipped with a series of freezers filled with liquid nitrogen, pumped in from an outdoor tank that kept temperatures at a frosty minus 158 degrees Fahrenheit. The freezers housed biological materials used in the lab— tissue samples riddled with viruses, bacteria, experimental cultures, and vaccines.
Research laboratories and the animal holding rooms were on Lab 257's second floor. When the Army refitted this former mine storage building, it slapped a sheet metal livestock chute onto the side of Lab 257 to herd animals into the second-floor animal rooms. By the hundreds, cattle, pigs, sheep, horses, goats, llamas, and other quadrupeds were herded up the ramp, through the doors, and into the second-floor holding pens. This floor housed the autopsy room, where animals were dissected and experiments performed on carcasses. When the dissection was through, lab workers shoved the diseased animal carcasses into a disposal chute, which dumped them into the incinerator one floor below, where they were cremated at temperatures exceeding 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The hot cremation exhaust ran through a filtered chimney on the roof and then poured out of the building in thick black tufts.
Lab 257 was a self-contained operation that functioned separately from the rest of Plum Island. For the animals, it was a one-way operation — animals that entered the lab never left alive. Engineered to prevent harmful viruses and other biological toxins from escaping, the lab's sustaining lifeblood was electric power. Electricity was needed to run the sewage decontamination plant, to create steam in decontamination rooms, to power the freezers, and — most important — to run the building's negative air pressure system, the cornerstone of Lab 257's biological containment system.