Tainted postal facility poses challenge

Two of the postal employees who worked in the Brentwood facility died of the inhaled form of anthrax.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Although they have the successful cleanup operation at a Senate office building to use as a model, workers eradicating the remaining anthrax spores at a massive postal facility in northeast Washington face a more difficult project.

For starters, the Senate Hart Office Building required decontamination of just 100,000 cubic feet of space. At the Brentwood postal facility, the space is 17.5 million cubic feet.

"Just sheer size is one of the challenges," said Thomas Day, vice president for engineering with the U.S. Postal Service, who outlined the decontamination plan Tuesday.

"But it is an open, easily accessible area. ... It's hard to make the complete comparison," he said. "The Hart building was a classic office environment with lots of nooks and crannies and bookshelves and desks and everything else."

The Brentwood facility, where two anthrax-laced letters were processed in October, is to be decontaminated using the same procedure as was used in the Hart building -- blowing in wave upon wave of chlorine dioxide gas to kill the anthrax spores.

Two of the postal employees who worked in the Brentwood facility died of the inhaled form of anthrax; two others contracted the disease but recovered.

The Postal Service made no promises about when the Brentwood facility, which was the central processing center for most of the city's mail and virtually all of the government's mail, would be free of the deadly anthrax spores.

Officials estimate that the price tag for decontaminationg the Brentwood facility will be about $22 million.

Some cleaning of the facility and its mountain of machinery has begun. But the chlorine dioxide procedure won't begin until late May at the earliest, Day said.

Before that happens, postal officials want to complete a weeks-long community outreach program, listening to the concerns of people who live near the facility. They will also hear the concerns of postal workers.

After the gas is pumped into and out of the building, some 3,000 test strips will be set up in various places inside to see whether there are any spores remaining. Some of the decontamination procedures may have to be repeated, authorities said.

The number of spores present in the Brentwood facility is likely to be much more than was found in the Hart building, because the deadly spores escaped the anthrax-laced letters like plumes of dust as the envelopes were spun through the mail processing machines.

The price tag for decontaminating the Brentwood facility will be about $22 million, officials estimated. A smaller mail facility in Trenton, New Jersey, which also faces decontamination work, will cost another $13 million.