After the power went out, each crew member grabbed two heavy-duty flashlights, stuffed one in each pocket, and the men split up and patrolled the building. To maintain biological containment in 257, B Crew needed to preserve sewage treatment, storage freezers, steam, and negative air pressure. Plum Island biological safety regulations call for a much larger crew during a storm of Hurricane Bob's magnitude, yet there were no reinforcements. Even with electric power, maintaining the building during the storm wouldn't be easy. Without power, it was futile. But there was no time for the men to dwell on that. They rose to the occasion, strong, handy men, resolved to handle the crisis as quickly and efficiently as possible. Lightning bolts flashed through the third-floor windows like strobes, briefly illuminating the hallways and lab rooms and casting ghostly shadows just before darkness set in again. Muffled through thick animal room doors, grunts and groans became noticeable to the ears of B Crew. The test animals, already moaning from the painful symptoms of deliberate viral infections, wailed loudly in fear, sensing the turmoil within the lab and the wretched storm outside. With the chillers down and no working ventilation fans, temperatures climbed over 100 degrees.
Sunday, August 18, 9:30 a.m. — By now, B Crew should have been relieved by the next shift, but travel between Plum Island and the mainland was completely cut off. Trapped by the raging storm, the crew continued to work feverishly inside Lab 257. While patrolling the ground floor of the building, Phillip's and Shine's shoes suctioned to the floor and made squishing noises with each step as they progressed down the hallway. Though he'd rather not have known what lay beneath, Shine instinctively moved his flashlight to the ground to investigate. He saw a thick layer of sludge coating the floor. It was rising rapidly. "Leaking wastewater," Shine figured. "There was overflowing sewage on the floor," Phillip remembers. "It was awful — because there was no place for it to go."
The sewage treatment in Lab 257 is based on a simple principle: heat kills. When cooked to a temperature that no living organism can withstand, bacteria and viruses are killed or permanently deactivated. Contaminated animal waste — blood, pus, sputum, saliva, vomit, feces, urine — from the second-floor lab rooms is drained through the beveled floor and piped downstairs to a thousand-gallon sewage holding tank. While that's a lot of sewage, the tank's capacity is still finite. "When you lose your power, your tank still fills up," notes Shine. "The animals in the labs are continuously throwing off water and waste." A single cow excretes over a hundred pounds of waste in a single day, and there were droves of them in Lab 257, all ailing with viruses. If the waste fills this primary tank, additional fluid is routed automatically to a smaller secondary overflow tank. It is transferred by means of an industrial pump that is fueled by electric power. "Regardless of power — this emergency tank is critical," Shine says.
As Hurricane Bob raged outside, Lab 257's sewage tank filled rapidly. With no emergency backup power, the overflow waste could not be redirected to the second tank. Shine read the gauges on the tanks, which remained operational despite the loss of electric power. "We're monitoring the gauges — they're still working — and it's getting up there. Way up there," Shine remembers. "We realized we needed to make provisions. We had to do something about this tank." If the crew didn't act fast, contaminated sewage would seep everywhere. For the workers trapped inside the lab, there would be no escaping the consequences. But it was too late.
Instead of bursting, the primary tank released contaminated waste through an emergency drainpipe. The waste spilled over, onto the floor. Shine and Phillip, wearing only gloves and rubber boots, mopped up the raw, infectious muck and worked frantically, trying to keep it from accumulating. If they paused even for a moment, they knew they would end up knee-deep in…God only knew what. They had to get the overflow problem under control or the basement of Lab 257 would soon be flooded in a sea of dangerous viral and bacterial biological matter. Contamination would escape the building, release into the outside air, and seep into the ground.
Searching in the dark through an equipment room upstairs, Phillip found an old, small gas pump and rushed it down to the basement. Phillip and Shine attempted to start it, but each time they pulled the cord, the pump sputtered, letting out a "p-p-p-p-p" and stopped. Taking turns, one held the flashlight while the other tinkered with the pump. Sludge continued to flow out of the drainpipe and onto the floor. The pungent odor emanating from the floor began to overwhelm the men. They stepped back for a break, gagging, and cupped their hands over their noses and mouths. Government safety requirements mandated that face respirators be worn for this type of work, and respirator units were available upstairs in the utility closet. But B Crew and the other workers had never been trained by the safety office to use them.
Standing in a torrent of rising sewage, they willed themselves to withstand the stench and returned to the pump. Resourcefully, they ran a hose from the primary to the secondary tank, using the makeshift pump to bypass the normal electrical system. They fired up the pump, and it coughed and splattered liquid in their faces. Then it slowly kicked into gear and began to suck the sewage into the overflow tank. Phillip expressed relief with a thumbs-up, and Shine gave him a high-five. As Phillip and Shine admired their rapid patch job, two of the other crewmen entered the room. It's beautiful! It's running beautiful, thought Shine, viewing their successful handiwork; while wiping beads of contamination off his face, he looked behind him and saw his co-workers. "Get the hell out of here!" he yelled at them. He and Phillip had already been in the room too long as it was. There was no reason why anyone else should be exposed to the puddles of sludge.
Sunday, August 18, 10:30 a.m. — The eye of Hurricane Bob passed directly over Block Island, twenty-five miles east of Plum Island. Inside the eye, winds were relatively calm, but the storm reached its maximum intensity just past the edge of the eye, in an area known as the "eye wall." On Block Island, wind speed at the eye wall was recorded at 105 mph, but that was inaccurate. The equipment couldn't record any higher. As the outside of the eye wall battered Plum Island, wind speed at the hurricane's most powerful point could only be imagined.
A long, deafening alarm screamed out in three bursts, paused for a long second, then screamed out again. It echoed through the dark hallways of Lab 257: "AAANNN… AAANNN… AAANNN… " It was the freezer alarm. "AAANNN… AAANNN… AAANNN."
The freezers were melting.
With the power out, temperatures in the electric freezers rose from their subzero levels. Inside the freezers, virus samples and experiments are kept in vials and Petri dishes at minus 158 degrees Fahrenheit. If the temperature rises high enough, biological samples stir in their dishes, activate, and multiply into lethal predators. Highly infectious viruses attach themselves to air particles and travel freely through the air before attaching to a host animal. Inside these freezers, on this cold, dark night, were cultures containing the germs that cause African swine fever, foot-and-mouth disease, Nairobi sheep disease and Rift Valley fever, among scores of other plagues — many infectious and communicable to humans. Some of the cultures were five decades old. All were living pathogens. For many of the germs, all it took was one short breath to become infected.