Government admits accidents at Plum Island biolab

out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas twenty-five miles long to bury carcasses. In the simulation, protests broke out in some cities amid food shortages. “It was a mess,” said Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas), who portrayed the president in that 2002 exercise. Now, as other lawmakers from the states under consideration do, Roberts supports moving the government’s new lab to his state. Manhattan, Kansas, is one of five mainland locations under consideration. “It will mean jobs” and spur research and development, he says. Other possible locations for the new National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility are Athens, Georgia; Butner, North Carolina; San Antonio, Texas; and Flora, Mississipi. The new site could be selected later this year, and the lab would open by 2014. The number of livestock in the counties and surrounding areas of the finalists range from 542,507 in Kansas to 132,900 in Georgia, according to the Homeland Security Department’s internal study.

Foot-and-mouth virus can be carried on a worker’s breath or clothes, or vehicles leaving a lab, and is so contagious it has been confined to Plum Island since the research began. The existing lab is 100 miles northeast of New York City in the Long Island Sound. Researchers there who work with the live virus are not permitted to own animals at home that would be susceptible, and they must wait at least one week after work before attending outside events where such animals might perform, such as a circus. Leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee also are worried about the lab’s likely move to the mainland. Chairman John Dingell (D-Michigan), and the head of the investigations subcommittee, Representative Bart Stupak (D-Michigan), also demanded reports about Crimson Sky and other studies on the consequences of live virus research on the U.S. mainland. DHS’s Cohen said those documents were provided.

Two lawmakers from New York, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Representative Timothy Bishop, both Democrats, expressed concerns in letters they wrote last year about DHS’s ability to protect the existing lab at Plum Island, which relies for security on a private security company and local police rather than federal agents. “We are particularly concerned that DHS has not been meeting the security needs of the facility since Federal Protective Service agents were removed from the island,” Clinton and Bishop wrote