NYT article on bioterrorism / US Postal Service
September 10, 2002
Can These Boxes Be Locked Against Terror?
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
As postal authorities scramble to strengthen security of
the mail, they face a daunting realization: the process
will take years, it will cost at least a billion dollars
and until it is finished the nation is probably even more
vulnerable than it was last fall, when anthrax-tainted
letters killed five people, sickened at least 17 more and
caused widespread disruption and fear.
Engineers are rushing to devise steps to deter bioterrorist
mailings, or to speed detection of any such attacks. They
are reconsidering almost every step in the chain that moves
200 billion pieces of mail a year - from the design of the
350,000 street-corner mailboxes to the way postage stamps
are printed and sold. Meanwhile, though, the postal system
stands revealed as a potent tool for terrorism.
"We cannot believe that whoever did this is the only one
capable or willing to do this," said Thomas G. Day, the
Postal Service's vice president for engineering. The
attacks last year served as a blueprint, he said. "Clearly
anyone who hadn't thought of it now fully understands it."
In fact, despite their toll, some postal authorities view
last year's attacks as a close call, not a true disaster.
For one thing, the tainted letters were apparently designed
to affect only the mail recipients. Their seams were
carefully taped and they were precisely addressed. But as
they passed through high-speed machinery, they spewed a
trail of spores that infected postal workers and,
apparently, people who received other mail moving through
the system at the same time.
"If such an incident was repeated on a larger scale, the
consequence to the economic health of the entire nation
could be truly incalculable," said Patrick R. Donahoe, the
Postal Service's senior vice president for operations, in
an August letter to the General Accounting Office.
The Postal Service, consulting with several federal
agencies, contractors, scientists, and the Royal Mail and
other postal agencies overseas, is proceeding with the
first stages of a long-term plan to secure its sprawling
system, in which almost every collection box is an
unguarded portal.
Private corporations and government agencies that are
potential targets or that handle floods of mail, among them
Pitney Bowes and the Internal Revenue Service, are also
conducting their own searches for ways to defuse biological
threats without impeding their work. The only mail being
routinely irradiated with bacteria-killing electron beams
or X-rays is that bound for government agencies in
Washington, leaving other offices, like the many addresses
for paying tax bills, unsecured.
The mail network - linking every address in America in a
chain of boxes, trucks, letter sorters, 750,000 letter
carriers and other postal workers - will never be immune to
terror, postal officials and experts say. But a number of
steps could reduce the threat.
Some efforts focus on reducing the volume of anonymous
mail, which now constitutes about 17 percent of the daily
flow of some 680 million items.
For example, the Postal Service plans eventually to change
most stamps from uniform bits of sticky paper to
personalized, encrypted records that would provide the
postal equivalent of caller ID. This would make it harder
for someone to send a malicious letter anonymously.
Letters, either the postage itself or a return address
label, would be imprinted with a box containing a dense
checkered pattern that encodes far more information than a
conventional bar code, according to the postal security
plan.
Such postage is already being sold over the Internet by
companies like Stamps.com to consumers seeking convenience.
But the Postal Service and private mail companies are
considering a vast expansion of this technology, even
offering it door to door.
Letter carriers may eventually wield hand-held printers -
somewhat like those used by workers checking in rental cars
- that can spit out personalized postage for each outgoing
letter.
Any concerns about reduced privacy would most likely be
outweighed, officials and experts said, by the knowledge
that such mail would be in the fast lane - in the same way
that proposed special identification cards for frequent
travelers might someday allow them to pass airport
checkpoints.
Besides serving as a deterrent, the data-containing postage
- read by sorting machinery all along a letter's path -
would allow investigators of an attack to more easily trace
an envelope back to its point of origin or sender.
The investigation of last fall's attacks remains hampered
by a lack of any data trail pointing to a perpetrator.
In fact, the only recent lead in the 11-month-old
investigation is a chance trace of anthrax found on a
single mailbox in Princeton, N.J., after swabs were done of
more than 600 collection boxes in the central part of the
state, where all the tainted letters are thought by
investigators to have originated.
The tainted box was removed from a street corner and now
sits in a sealed enclosure at the Army's Edgewood center,
undergoing more analysis to see if its anthrax strain
matches the deadly Ames variant used in the attacks,
investigators said. In another effort to reduce the amount
of potentially suspicious mail, the Postal Service is also
working on certifying as secure the operations of the
dominant users of its system: commercial mailing houses
sending electric bills, fashion catalogs and the like.
With adequate security and screening of employees, such
mail could be deemed "safe," postal officials say, cutting
the volume of mail bound for biohazard detection systems or
subject to irradiation.
The number of blue mailboxes is likely to be reduced, and
those that remain may eventually be monitored by video
cameras and have replaceable plastic liners that will
prevent any contamination from spreading.
Other efforts focus on detecting the presence of pathogens
in the mail.
At two mail-sorting hubs in Virginia, postal engineers and
the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
say they successfully tested new systems that check the
dust that arises from sorting machinery as the mail moves
through it. The checks, performed hourly using a process
called polymerase chain reaction, would bathe dust samples
in enzymes that cause DNA to explosively replicate,
allowing quick comparisons to a library of known DNA
sequences from anthrax, bubonic plague or other pathogens.
In theory, if DNA from one of the threats were present in
the dust, the system would detect it and contaminated mail
could be stopped before the first trucks rolled.
Detection systems are important, postal experts say,
because even a single contaminated envelope can spread
pathogens widely. This potential was vividly demonstrated
in recent tests run on postal machinery assembled at the
Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, the Army's main
research center for testing chemical and biological
defenses, in Aberdeen, Md.
Video cameras recorded close-up images as test envelopes
containing spores of a harmless anthrax cousin moved
through the machinery. "It's amazing how much comes out
even when the corners on the envelope are taped shut," Mr.
Day said.
The Postal Service is planning to award $200 million in
contracts this fall to install the detection systems.
Meanwhile, companies like Lockheed Martin are developing
more sophisticated detection systems for vulnerable
agencies and businesses. These would set off extra
biochemical tests if they detected particularly minute
particles with the signature of bacterial spores.
In a separate effort to prevent spores from dispersing, the
service also plans to spend an estimated $245 million on
large networks of exhaust vents and vacuums that will draw
dust out of the sorting machines and trap any particles in
filters.
Until last fall's attacks, workers cleaned the machines by
blowing compressed air through them, a process that is
believed to have spread any anthrax that escaped from
tainted letters.
It will take months to install the new equipment at all of
the postal system's 282 hangarlike sorting centers.
Two sorting centers that handled the tainted mail, the
Brentwood facility that serves Washington and one in
Hamilton Township, N.J., where all the tainted letters
apparently originated, remain sealed, awaiting cleansing
with the same chlorine dioxide gas used to kill any
lingering anthrax in the Hart Senate Office Building. That
is where the anthrax mailings first came to light after the
letter to Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic majority
leader from South Dakota, was opened in a cloud of powder
on Oct. 15.
Other post offices and transfer points where trace
contamination was seen, from Florida to Connecticut, were
cleaned last fall and remain open.
It remains to be seen, however, whether the new security
and safety measures will work the way engineers hope they
will. Yesterday, for example, the General Accounting
Office, the investigating arm of Congress, strongly
recommended more testing and analysis before the Postal
Service begins installing the vacuum exhaust systems. One
concern, the G.A.O. analysts said, is that the vacuums
could disrupt the separate effort to sample air and test
for biological hazards. Another is the cost of running them
and providing enormous amounts of electricity.
On Friday, a new federal task force under the White House
Office of Homeland Security and drawn from eight agencies
will hold the first of several meetings to assess the DNA
detection method that postal officials prefer.
Dr. Lawrence D. Kerr, the director of bioterrorism research
and development in the Office of Homeland Security, said it
would be a mistake to invest heavily in a new system, only
to find out that it was still porous.
"The Postal Service has been in an almost yearlong 24-hour,
7-days-a-week process of searching for the ideal system to
implement nationwide," he said. "But as we look to this
technology, we still need to make sure it passes rigorous
scientific review."
The prospect of further delays is frustrating to postal
officials and workers alike. Employees from Brentwood and
Hamilton, still traumatized by the deaths and illnesses of
co-workers, say they are worried that the pace of adopting
new protections will be too slow to save them from the side
effects of another assault.
Mr. Day, the Postal Service official, said he was confident
that the bioterrorism plan would pass muster and that the
American public would be willing to invest in improvements
that would make the postal system safer for employees and
mail recipients.
"We're convinced that the technical fix we have coming
forward will reduce the threat," he said. "If you're going
to send a biohazard through the mail, we're going to detect
it very quickly, get it isolated and contained and, if
necessary, get people medicated."
In the end, however, the last line of defense will simply
be mail handlers and recipients on the alert for suspicious
envelopes or contents, and health workers alert to symptoms
of exposure to biological or chemical weapons.
Dr. Clifton R. Lacy, the New Jersey health and senior
services commissioner, whose state remains a focal point in
the anthrax investigation, said he was confident that from
this perspective at least the response to any new assault
would be far more effective.
"It's like what happens to the human body when it's exposed
to a foreign substance - a virus, the flu, whatever," he
said. "With the second exposure, the response is quicker,
more coordinated and more decisive."
"Health care providers and the public have undergone quite
an education," he said. "We're ready."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company. |
