Wired-Why would any sane person put a Level 4 biodefense lab in Galveston?

[LunaSea]

Heck of a ..cough....job..

"It's not like no one thought Galveston could ever be hit by a monster storm. The city was almost destroyed in The Great Storm of 1900 which struck on September 8 of that year and killed 6000 people. The Thomas Edison Company has historic film footage of the destruction. So it seems a bit odd (I understate) that the geniuses at the Department of Homeland Security and NIH decided that Galveston was a good place for one of the first two high containment biodefense laboratories to be built after 9/11 (the other is situated in a densely populated neighborhood in Boston, another sterling choice).

more
http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/09/effect-measure.html

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/weather/09/12/ike.biological.agents/

snip

A Department of Homeland Security official concurred that all the samples had been destroyed, and the building was locked down, quarantined and "rendered safe."

But a former student who worked at the Level-III laboratory while the Level-IV facility was being constructed and who knows the manager, said she would be surprised if all of the pathogens had been destroyed, since some of them are rare and extremely valuable.

The facility is the World Health Organization's center for research on arboviruses, such as ticks and mosquitoes, and tropical disease work, said the student, who asked not to be identified.

It also holds ebola virus and fever-causing lassa virus, sometimes-fatal hantaviruses and anthrax bacteria, she said.

She added that all Level-IV laboratories are designed to ensure they can withstand hurricanes, and because of its location, special care was taken with the laboratory in Galveston.
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"I know that everyone at that facility, every single person at that facility, I'm certain has done everything they could possibly do to ensure that the community and the facility is absolutely safe, because all the people that work there, their livelihood and careers are dependent on the things that are held in that lab, and they would be destroyed -- just as much as the community would be destroyed -- if anything were to happen," she said.

CDC spokesman Von Roebuck said only that "quite a bit has been done" to secure the laboratory.

[MadrasT]

1. Are they out of their freakin' minds???

:wtf:

[barbtries]

24. uh, ya

nothing new about that...:(

[undeterred]

2. Holy shit.

We should have put Cheney and Bush there. Why didn't anyone think of it?

[merh]

3. Holy Shit

The toxins are bad enough thanks to the oil refineries and petrochemical plants - a biodefense lab?

Why would you put it in Galveston - holy shit. :wtf:

[sinkingfeeling]

4. "Earmark"????

[leftofthedial]

5. sanity and "biodefense" are mutually incompatible

[eShirl]

6. will they relocate it to the San Andreas fault?

[EFerrari]

7. We don't want them! n/t

[stray cat]

8. Its an island surrounded by water with limited access

[LunaSea]

11. Except those "all access" type hurricanes.

I can grasp the manifold reasons, but isn't that why we have North Dakota?
Nice, empty, frozen.....

Galveston island is just so.. Stephen King..ish.

[Ikonoklast]

12. So is Alcatraz

Doesn't make it a smart place to put anything as dangerous with the potential to infect 4.2 million people.

[intheflow]

18. Cheyenne Mountain is the most secure facility in the US.

VERY limited access deep inside a mountain, will never be affected by hurricane, water contamination, earthquake, or fire. Galveston Island is accessible by motor vehicle, ship and car, MUCH more susceptible to hurricanes and also terrorist attacks. So Galveston being an island is really not a defensible reason to place such a lab there, though I'm sure people in power would still cite that as a reasonable defense of facility placement.

[DS1]

9. Nothing to see here folks, just shoveling Federal money towards Texas

[MountainLaurel]

10. I think that's pretty much it n/t

[butterfly77]

13. Does this have to be said again...

This is the most lazy,incompetent,stupid,uninformed, administration in history...

[Barack_America]

14. This is more of a blow to taxpayers pocketbooks than their safety.

Lot of wasted money there.

But I don't see how any of those flooded-out pathogens could pose a risk to humans.

[nichomachus]

15. How about Crawford, Texas?

We could have the George Bush Presidential Library and Loathsome Disease Center -- sort of a combined facility.

[pitohui]

16. there are bio defense lab/bio terrorism labs in southern louisiana too

what can i tell you? this nation doesn't care about people in the south and don't care if we are harmed -- they know about the storms but rather these things are located around southerners rather than the real people (do i sound bitter, well, maybe i am bitter!)

there is a center pretty near where i live where animals have routinely escaped over the years, and i don't mean lab rats, i mean PRIMATES

[tannybogus]

17. This was a "Law and Order SVU" episode

It happened during Katrina. Some nutball who worked at the lab got everything ready to steal the deadlies right before the hurricane hit. Everybody else hit the road and all the deadlies were supposed to be destroyed or whatever.Instead he got a load in a van and headed for NYC. Anthrax got loose, and when they tracked him down, he had sold some deadlies to "someone." Tv is just reality with a script and the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

[dgibby]

19. Hmmmmm???

Could this be located in the area that has a gov't imposed news blackout and could this be the reason for this blackout, perhaps? Just wondering.:shrug:

[tannybogus]

22. Here's the plot:

Storm
After a girl is struck down by a taxi, she reveals at the hospital that the man who took off with her sister wasn't her father but rather someone who saved the girls from New Orleans and asked to be called "daddy". The detectives trail the child molester, but when they catch him, he dies from anthrax. The Feds sweep in and throw the police off the case. When a teenager and her younger sister end up in the hospital after a day at the park, detectives learn that both girls were abducted from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina along with a third sister who is still missing. Despite the interference of a local reporter, Jackson Zane, detectives are able to catch the kidnapper, a known pedophile, and recover the girl. But when Alvin Dutch dies and the autopsy determines the cause was anthrax smuggled out of a New Orleans laboratory during the hurricane by a rogue scientist, Benson puts everything on the line so that she can get the truth out there.
"Ripped from the headlines" involving the case of Journalist Judith Miller

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_&_Order:_Special_Victims_Unit_(season_7)

Anthrax hoax victim
On October 12, 2001, Judith Miller opened an anthrax hoax letter mailed to her New York Times office. The 2001 anthrax attacks had begun occurring in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, with anthrax-laced letters sent to ABC News, CBS News, NBC News and the New York Post, all in New York City, as well as the National Enquirer in Boca Raton, Florida. Two additional letters (with a higher grade of anthrax) were sent on October 9, 2001 to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy in Washington. Twenty-two people were sickened; five died.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller_(journalist)

They left out the very last scene when they catch up to the thief and he has sold the goods.Judith Miller as in Plamegate.:tinfoilhat:

[hedgehog]

20. Why stop with the bio-labs? Wouldn't an island be an ideal

place to bury nuclear waste as well?

[LeftHander]

21. Mail some anthrax and go to the beach for a cocktail....neat....nt

[Greyskye]

23. Insane. Simply insane.

:wtf:

[PVnRT]

25. Why? Political considerations.

Many of which have nothing at all to do with practicality.