We continue with Michael Christopher Carroll's work on Plum Island.The content of these two chapters do not make me feel any better about our insane government's intention to drop Plum Island's replacement right into the heart of the nation,in the very near future.Puts the Dorothy/Toto remark in a whole new light...
....A February 1993 incident form noted a “critical alarm sewage spill” in Building 102. Joe remembers, “I was directly involved with this.” Since the building opened in 1956, the plant had always run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But the private contractor ran it only ten hours a day. “The collection process will be unattended, with 100 percent reliance upon the automatic and emergency collection equipments,” stated an internal USDA letter on this decision. “They did it to save money,” says Joe, shaking his head in disgust. “What else?”
One winter night, an operator left his shift after recording the 27,000 gallon No. 2 tank as only 7,000 gallons full. High winds and rough sea conditions prevented the next shift from getting to the island the following day, so it remained unattended. When the weather finally calmed, the shift operator opened the door to Building 102 and came upon a putrid smell—something had gone terribly wrong in the tank area. A single 1,000-pound cow excretes from 75 to 115 pounds of manure a day, and a single 200-pound pig, 35 to 65 pounds; it isn’t hard to see how quickly raw, infected sewage accumulates on Plum Island each day. Second only to the incinerator charging room, Building 102 is the biologically “hottest” area, and is therefore kept painstakingly clean. On a normal day, “that building is as clean as a whistle,” says Joe. “It is cleaner than my house—you could eat off the floor in there.” But that morning, the operator and his assistant, who came upon the large pool of gushing brown mess, were gagging within seconds for clean air. “I saw nothing but shit all over the place,” says the operator. “Raw, no decontamination, viruses and who knows what—everywhere.” The men witnessed a macabre sight: a continuous flow of contaminated sewage, vomiting out of the overflow valve, after being pumped from the No. 2 tank, through a daisy chain of pipes. Underneath the pool of sewage, fluid was emptying into the floor drains, where sump pumps sent it back into the No. 2 tank; from there, it cycled through again. “We were essentially recycling raw sewage,” says Joe. First, the men processed some contaminated sewage out to make room in the tanks. Then, donning Tyvek protective jumpsuits, hip boots, and face respirators, they drained and mopped up the mess, flushing the room down with Roccal solution. Research in Lab 101 seized up for two days. “They couldn’t so much as flush a toilet in 101, because we couldn’t handle it in 102.”
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.
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/08/part-5-lab-257-disturbing-governments.html
