Simply put, electric power was the building's most precious resource. Without it, Lab 257 morphed from a safe research facility into an extremely dangerous biological threat.
As the hurricane swirled closer, strong winds blew down power lines on Long Island. Normally, Plum Island's power was supplied by the Long Island Lighting Company, via an undersea cable on the ocean floor. But the LILCO power grid shorted out and mainland power to the island laboratory failed. Fortunately, there was a backup plan. Oil-fired power generators kicked in at Building 103, the Plum Island emergency power plant, and supplied the island with electricity. The huge generators in Building 103 were old, but they were well maintained and effective.
Building 103 supplied Lab 257 with power through overhead power lines and through underground cables that provided "redundancy." Typically, if one power conduit failed, the other was switched on as a backup so power could continue uninterrupted. This Sunday, however, redundancy wasn't given a chance.
Hurricane winds, gusting over one hundred miles per hour, toppled the island's overhead electric poles. "They fell over like they were as light as toothpicks," recalls Dave Stakey, in a scratchy smoker's voice. A genial, slightly disheveled man, he sports a long ponytail and diamond studs in each ear. As one of the island's longtime electrical engineers, Stakey knew the island like the back of his hand.
With the wires down, workers in Building 103 threw the wide jumper switches that engaged the emergency generators. After a series of flickering lights, all of the island's buildings were back on-line except one — Lab 257. Earlier that morning in 257, the power went down a few times. Explains Phillip, "It was intermittent and then it came back steady. But then the lights started to slowly dim." At this point, B Crew member Stanley "Shine" Mickaliger, a twenty-year veteran of Plum Island, was not sure if power was coming back. But he was hopeful. A sixty-one-year-old master plumber, Mickaliger joined Plum Island after years in the trade. Of Polish extraction, Shine — called "Sunshine" for his ever-grinning as a boy — grew up in Riverhead, the youngest of nine. "For this short period of time," says Shine, "we were thinking the [emergency] generators would come on-line.
'Why are they gone?' we all wondered. In the past, we had power failures where we'd been out for an hour or two at most."
But this time, things were different. After two hours without power, their worst fears came true. They radioed the power plant and learned that emergency power was being pumped into all buildings on the island, yet the lights were still out in Lab 257. B Crew gathered together in the boiler room in quiet disbelief. At around 8:00 a.m., Shine broke the silence and delivered the grim news. "Guys, the overhead is gone — that's it, guys, we're out." The members of the team shifted uncomfortably and exchanged troubled glances. They knew they were on their own.
Just a few feet beyond the eerie yellow glow of their flashlights lay the end of the universe. Everything past it — all of Lab 257—was pitch-black. Ordinarily, working overnights in the lab was akin to "being in a tin can," says Shine. "After everyone went home, it was just the few of us in that big building, all alone." The building usually had a low, steady hum to it, sounds of boilers heating, steam pumping, fans turning, and light fixtures buzzing. That was the sound accompanying the men on graveyard shift every night since Lab 257 opened for business way back in 1954. Now there was a different sound. The distinctive "sound" of utter silence in the dark. And man's worst fears were all around.
Three months prior to Hurricane Bob, in a flurry of sparks and a wisp of gray smoke, one of the underground conductors shorted out; with it went the underground cable as a source of electricity. Dave Stakey, who was working on the island that night, restored power. "I was on duty the night the cable went. It was an 'uh-oh,' and then we put [Lab 257] on the overheads." Standard operating procedure called for using the underground cable as 257's primary power source, while the overhead lines were used as an emergency standby. So for the past three months, Lab 257 had been running on its emergency feed, the overhead transmission lines. "We no longer had an alternative means of supplying the building," says Stakey. The emergency backup had become the only option.
In full-time use, the overhead power lines went down about once a month. "We had this continuous problem on the overheads, because you had birds flying into them," Stakey says. "We would get Canadian geese — and occasionally an osprey — flying into the lines and shorting them out, either from phase-to-phase or phase-to-ground." In the orange-purple tint of dusk, the great fish hawks swooped down, grasping sharp sticks to build nests on the cross-arms of the poles, and sometimes the sticks sliced into the wires, causing short circuits. To rectify the problem, New York Telephone erected nesting poles back in the 1950s to lure the birds away from telephone and power lines, but it never worked; it actually increased the number of nesting places and expanded the flocks. An engineer from the early days said that during 1954, the year Lab 257 opened for business, adult ospreys had flown into power lines and momentarily knocked out the power to the laboratory no less than three times.
The island's top brass knew about the damaged underground cable because B Crew's foreman, Walt Sinowski, Stakey, and the other "electrics" told them. According to Shine, every time Sinowski began the shift, he penciled into the Lab 257 logbook, "underground still out — not repaired." Underground power and telephone cables had blown out before and were promptly repaired. But this time, management flatly refused to repair Lab 257's electrical umbilical cord.
Though the 1991 budget was invested in items like a new ferry service to Connecticut and a new gym, Dr. Breeze and his facility manager, Ernest Escorsica, thought replacing the cable was too expensive. The cost: $70,000. It would have to wait for next year's budget. An appeal to Washington for emergency funds could have been sought, but no such appeal was made. In a letter after the hurricane to Congressman George Hochbrueckner, Dr. Breeze wrote matter-of-factly, "We made the decision not to replace the underground cable which provides power to Lab 257 immediately after it shorted out…because overhead power lines to the building were available and all [fiscal year 1991] funds had been committed." Apparently, Dr. Breeze was unable to appreciate the damage hurricane winds could have on overhead power lines, or the need for backup electric power to ensure biological safety.
Plum Island deputy Jerry Crawford conceded the government's mis-judgment when he later blundered to reporters that "in an operation of this size, something can fall through the cracks." But, Dr. Crawford added, he did not feel that the lack of backup power was critical to the maintenance of Lab 257. To electrician Dave Stakey, however, the power going down was beyond inexcusable. "We had our generators at the power plant," he laments. "We certainly had enough fuel. We could've given them power if we had a way to get it to them."
So without a working underground cable or on-site power generator, Lab 257 remained at the mercy of flimsy overhead lines and their questionable reliability.
For this gross negligence, a terrible price would be paid.
Sunday, August 18, 8:00 a.m. — Bob's winds howled louder with each passing hour. Rain poured down like a shower of falling nails. The ground shook with each thunderbolt. Waves that normally rolled gently onto the island's beaches now crashed high upon the shore, spraying water thirty five feet into the air and flooding low-lying areas. Just three hundred feet from the coast, B Crew huddled in total darkness inside Lab 257. They heard low, rumbling sounds and felt the muted vibrations of the hurricane, protected by the lab's three-foot-thick masonry walls. But inside the building, a deadlier storm was brewing.