The series of spore-filled anthrax letters sent to ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Post, the National Enquirer and several congressional offices seriously injured 22 people and killed five, virtually shut down the congressional mail system and State Department mail system for weeks, and closed two post offices in New Jersey and suburban Washington D.C. for years. Another 28 people, including 20 on the staff of Sen. Tom Daschle, at the time the Senate Majority Leader, tested positive for anthrax exposure.
The biggest long-term financial cost has been chemical decontamination, and while major decontamination of buildings is usually conducted by private contractors and other government agencies, that’s a role that soldiers from the Army Chemical Corps are equipped to perform in the initial stages of an attack.
The Ozarks saw an example of those emergency responses last year when a foreign graduate student at the University of Missouri at Rolla claimed to have released anthrax and planted a bomb at his school. Missouri’s 7th Civil Support Team and Fort Leonard Wood’s explosive ordnance disposal unit were sent to the university which was shut down while 23 people — eight students, a faculty member, and emergency personnel who responded — went through unpleasant decontamination procedures for their exposure to what was eventually determined to be harmless sugar.
Even hoaxes can be disruptive and expensive, but real incidents can be worse. Chlorine dioxide was used to fumigate and decontaminate U.S. Senate offices and a mailroom through which anthrax-laden letters to two senators had passed. The building housing the National Enquirer and related tabloid publications was shuttered for years and finally bought for only a fraction of its value by another company which paid millions to decontaminate it.
“It was an economic loss big-time,” said Capt. John Wilson of Florida’s 44th Civil Support Team, who had entered the building in full protective biohazard gear to determine the extent of the contamination.
Many items never could be decontaminated. Wilson said a key concern was the tabloid’s photo archives.
“They had a pretty comprehensive photo library archive, everything from Elvis Presley laying in state in his casket all the way to when Hillary Clinton met the aliens whenever they came to D.C. back during the Clinton administration,” Wilson said. “So they were genuinely concerned about, when the ultimate decision on decontamination was made, what kind of impact it would make on their property, because it was valued in the millions and millions of dollars some of the photographs they had.”
While most of those 8,000 boxes of archived files and photos finally had to be destroyed, Chemical Corps museum director Kim Lindberg said the Army Chemical Corps wants to maintain a record of the role of the Civil Support Teams in responding for their first-ever operational deployment in the United States. Speaking during a Tuesday afternoon ceremonial opening of the new exhibits, Lindberg said this year marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chemical Corps in 1918 during World War II as well as the tenth anniversary of the founding of America’s Civil Support Team units.
Explaining the role of the Army Chemical Corps in the war on terror has been a high priority of Brig. Gen. Thomas Spoehr, the outgoing commandant of the Army Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear School.
“Our biggest supporter has been from the beginning our commandant,” Lindberg said.
Spoehr said the ten-year process of raising up a national network of specialist responders to chemical or biological attacks has proceeded in “stops and starts and misguided steps,” including some significant setbacks and mistakes.
“At the school, we didn’t have the training exactly right either,” Spoehr said. “But I am proud to say 10 years later, I believe that we have gotten — and our country has gotten — the program exactly right.”
The program has now resulted in the creation of 53 CST teams and more on the way, and made the American response system a worldwide model.
“We’re very quick to find fault lots of times when we don’t have enough of this or we don’t have enough of that or we wish we could have done better,’” Spoehr said. “But I will tell you when I go to international forums … they were all coming to me and saying, ‘I just wish we had something half as good as the United States of America in terms of consequence management capability.”
Walking through the museum raised questions for Spoehr—questions he sometimes regretted.
“I was telling these guys as we were previewing this exhibit and seeing some of the equipment in there and was asking myself, ‘Where did you get this stuff,’ and then I said, ‘No, don’t tell me where you got it, I don’t want to know.’”
About two-thirds of the Army’s Chemical Corps members are in the National Guard and Army Reserve rather than on active duty, and Spoehr said the role of the National Guard in providing civil support teams as a full-time response to state and local emergencies is a crucial part of the military’s developing role in security against attacks home as well as abroad.
“This is exactly what our Department of Defense should be doing,” Spoehr said.