If you have little confidence in that bumbling bureaucracy called the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a reading of its just-issued draft environmental impact statement for what would be its National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) will confirm your viewpoint.
In 2005, the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, announced that it was going to shut down the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and replace it with the new facility, the NBAF. DHS took over Plum Island from the Agriculture Department after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The half-century-old Plum Island center “is nearing the end of its life cycle, and the Homeland Security mission requires replacing [it] with a new facility,” it said then. The center “is insufficient to support the increasing levels of research and development needed to meet the growing concerns about accidental or intentional introduction of foreign animal diseases into this country.”
NBAF would function at Bio-Safety Level 4, the highest danger level set for biological research. At that level, as the new environmental impact statement says, research involves “pathogens that pose a high risk of life-threatening disease in animals and humans through the aerosol route and for which there is no known vaccine or therapy.”
DHS initially put together a list of 18 potential NBAF sites and then whittled that down to five: Georgia, Mississippi, Kansas, North Carolina and Texas. Many officials and residents of those places have said they would welcome such a facility. But then, suddenly last year, DHS announced it was adding Plum Island to the list of five finalists.
The DHS statement (downloadable from its website) is bullish on Plum Island being the NBAF site, despite strong opposition by officials and residents of Long Island and the enormous dangers specific to Plum Island as the site.
The main claim DHS makes in the statement is that compared to the other five locations, the “site-specific risk” in having the NBAF on Plum Island ranks as “low” as compared to “moderate” for the others. This, it says, is in part because Plum Island is surrounded by water.
Yes, but ignored by the DHS is how that water and the exposed island’s location amid busy marine traffic lanes, one-and-a-half-miles off Orient Point, provides for a better pathway for terrorists than the other sites on land deep in the U.S. mainland.
This is not a theoretical issue. As emphasizes the 2004 book by Michael Christopher Carroll, “Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory,” in a 2002 raid by U.S. Army commandos of a terrorist organization tied to Osama bin Laden, data on disease agents and “a dossier” on the Plum Island center were found. Wrote Mr. Carroll: “It’s not the sandy beaches and swaying palm trees they’re after.”
Further, DHS argues the “site-specific risk” is “low” because there are far fewer numbers of animals in proximity to Plum Island as compared to the mainland sites. Yes, but research would be done involving life-threatening diseases that affect both animals and humans, and Plum Island is right off the human population center of the United States—Boston, Long Island and Manhattan.
And we’re talking about powerful diseases, such as the napa virus, that, the statement notes, causes “highly fatal encephalitis in humans and can be contagious among humans.”
The statement is candid about disclosing accidents, including at BSL-4 laboratories. “Even with improved engineering and design of high-containment biological laboratories, accident releases due to human error or maintenance failures still occur,” it acknowledges (Page E-11). It spends pages listing various accidents.
But, otherwise, the statement is off-base—even on where Plum Island is. The statement notes that “the island is technically located in the Village of Greenfield, Town of Southold, Suffolk County, New York” (Page 2-12). There is no Village of Greenfield in Southold or Suffolk. There is the Village of Greenport, west of Plum Island.
It will take a huge battle to stop DHS from siting the NBAF on Plum Island. Public officials will have to fight hard along with the people of Long Island. The residents of the DHS’s imaginary Village of Greenfield need not participate.
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