Government

So what’s Plum Island really like? One reporter’s inside tour

Landfall, Plum Island

Your opening introduction to Plum Island is conducted by a friendly public relations officer who explains the activities, rules and regulations that apply to the government facility. It’s that same public relations officer who will sell you shirts, caps and even cookbooks he said aren’t filled with recipes on how to prepare possum, a joke, we assume, about animal experimentation. The recipes are really good, he insists.

Our guide describes Plum Island as “like a small city,” with its own fire department and emergency medical services. It also has emergency generators, fuel storage tanks and a wastewater treatment plant
You’re allowed to take pictures on most of the island, but not of security guards, their uniforms or even the badges you wear around your neck during your visit.

Security is tight, to put it mildly, with visitors required to provide information to the Department of Homeland Security before being allowed to take any Plum Island tour. Armed guards follow everywhere and a guard in a separate vehicle followed our bus, always on high alert. What struck my partner initially about the armed guards was feeling like a prisoner, transported from place to place.

But the guards generally showed themselves to be as friendly and gracious as our guide.

The average visitor doesn’t get to tour the laboratory where work occurs. Lab workers must wear special garb and take five-minute showers before leaving the premises. Eyeglasses must be soaked in a special solution for 15 minutes to ensure no bacteria is being released from the lab. There are occasional places where you will be asked not to take pictures, but those are rare.

Most visitors don’t enter the laboratory, but get a thorough tour of the grounds and an explanation of what goes on there. The aim, according to our guide, is to end the secrecy that informed the Plum Island operations after it opened in 1954 and gave rise to so many false tales about strange occurrences, he says.

He demonstrates his own faith in the safety of Plum Island by referencing a family day planned for Plum Island employees in August to which he says he’ll be bringing his young children.

Part of the tour even includes Building 257 — an antiquated and dismally decaying building that originally housed the biological weapons operations and also gave rise to those stories about extremely weird experiments being carried out here.

Rumors, facts, arguments

To get it out of the way at the top: the federal government says the Animal Disease Center at Plum Island specializes in just that, studying diseases such as hoof and mouth and developing possible vaccines to protect the nation’s food supply. It’s a highly secure facility that has experienced only one lapse, according to official sources. That was in 1978 when an animal being tested escaped from an outside pen, but not from the island. The response was to end the practice of keeping animals in outdoor pens and moving them inside the laboratory.

But as columnist Karl Grossman has written, the “U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) have brought charges through the years involving the Plum Island waste,” some of which involves carcasses. Today, a government spokesman said the only waste materials  are what an ordinary neighborhood produces and that’s treated at an on-island wastewater treatment plant.

A federal environmental review has also acknowledged that contamination on the island has never been satisfactorily investigated.

And then there’s Building 257, which was used by the U.S. Army to develop biological weapons during the Cold War, according to government documents obtained by Newsday. The purpose was to produce weapons, it’s been reported, that could impact the food supply of the former Soviet Union.

When Building 257 closed in 1995, it wasn’t decontaminated, and today is mostly affected by asbestos, according to a Plum Island spokesman.

But Michael Carroll, author of “Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory,” has a different take. As he told Mr. Grossman for a Reporter column, “Every effort to decontaminate Lab 257 … has failed. They can’t get that building clean.”