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Anthrax: Decontamination Costs Exceed Previous Estimates It will cost hundreds of millions of dollars and at least one more year to fully decontaminate all of the buildings that were tainted with anthrax during the 2001 attacks, the Baltimore Sun reported today. The lasting effects of the attacks far exceed previous expectations, according to the Sun. “The economic costs are huge,” said Dorothy Canter, chief scientist for biological terrorism issues at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “It’s in the hundreds of millions of dollars for the cleanup alone,” she added. No precise estimate of total decontamination costs is available yet because work is still ongoing, officials said. The U.S. Postal Service has estimated that it will cost more than $100 million to decontaminate the Brentwood Road postal facility in Washington and a contaminated mail-sorting center in Hamilton, N.J. (see GSN, July 2). It will cost more than $40 million to fully decontaminate Capitol Hill office buildings, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (see GSN, March 7; Scott Shane, Baltimore Sun, Dec. 18). The project to decontaminate the Brentwood facility — which includes a construction site, a testing ground and a chemical plant — is uniquely complex and the largest of the decontamination projects, Postal Service officials said (see GSN, Dec. 16). “Ever worked on one of those Rubik’s Cubes?” John Bridges, the Postal Service’s on-site commander in chief, said earlier this week, describing the cleanup project. Technicians this week began recovering thousands of spore strips and air and surface samples from the facility, which will be tested to determine the success of the decontamination project, according to the Washington Post. The results of those tests are expected to be made available to an independent committee for review next month. If the project is successful, the facility’s 1,600 employees might return by spring, the Post reported. “We don’t want to claim victory too early,” Bridges said. “We’re very excited it went off without a hitch,” he added (Manny Fernandez, Washington Post, Dec. 18). Months of experiments to find the best ways to kill anthrax spores have increased decontamination costs, officials said. “We’ve never had to do anything like this in history,” said Barbara Johnson, president of the American Biological Safety Association. “The government is erring very, very much on the side of safety. It’s a very conservative approach, but I don’t think there’s any other choice,” she added. A conservative approach has been taken to ensure that workers will be safe when they re-enter decontaminated buildings, officials said. Postal workers, in particular, have been vocal about concerns that they were needlessly exposed to risks during the attacks, according to the Baltimore Sun (see GSN, Dec. 9). “Some people are ready to go back,” said Dena Briscoe, a postal employee and president of Brentwood Exposed, an advocacy group representing workers of the closed facility. “But a lot of people still have fears. Some people just wish the building could be abandoned,” she added. The Postal Service has begun testing biological agent detectors, which can identify about 12 biological agents such as anthrax, at Baltimore’s main postal facility, the Sun reported. Evaluators plan to install detectors in an additional 14 facilities for further analysis, Postal Service spokesman Bob Novak said (Shane, Baltimore Sun). For further information, see: CDC Frequently Asked Questions About Anthrax Journal of the American Medical Association Background on Anthrax GSN Anthrax Attack Chronology (Dec. 12, 2001)
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