Lab and Community Make for Uneasy Neighbors

Near the Frederick County home of Bruce E. Ivins, a suspect in the anthrax attacks who committed suicide, a woman rides a scooter past a line of television satellite trucks and other vehicles. (By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
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And now, in a two-story white house with dark red shutters on a street lined with maples and oaks, comes Ivins's suicide.

Early yesterday, a young man who was visibly upset and pacing in the yard yelled at a reporter to leave the front porch. A woman and another man then tried to calm the young man and walk him back inside the house.

"He was a great neighbor, always quick to help out if you needed anything," said Bonnie Duggan, Natalie's mother, who lives down the street in the community of young families, retirees and immigrants. "He was not one of those people who was reclusive and stuck to himself. He wasn't that kind of person.

"That he would be implicated in any kind of way with the anthrax letters and so forth is a tremendous shock," she said.

Along North Market street in the nearby city of Frederick, Jane Mackley was having coffee with friends yesterday.

"It seems strange that all this would be linked to Frederick," she said. "Just hearing something nationwide that comes back to our little town. . . . It kind of blows your mind."

Yet others were not so surprised that the anthrax case was tied to Fort Detrick.

"We've known . . . that the anthrax letters were an inside job for a very long time," said Barry Kissin, a Frederick lawyer and opponent of the base's expansion, who called the facility "a germ factory."

The technology that went into the attacks had to have come from a U.S. military laboratory or a contractor working for one, Kissin said.

But until fairly recently, "Detrick could do no wrong, no matter what," he said.

In June, the Environmental Protection Agency said it planned to add the base to the Superfund list of the most polluted places in the country.

Still, the base has benefited the community.

"We've not had a bad relationship with Fort Detrick on an ongoing basis," said Gray, the county commissioner. "It's been good. But the county's never taken a real hard stance in regards to safety."

With a workforce of 4,800, the installation is the largest employer in the county. It began in the 1930s as a National Guard airfield and became a biological laboratory during World War II.

As home to the Army Biological Warfare Laboratories, the facility ran a top-secret program producing offensive biological weapons from 1943 until 1969.

During World War II, 5,000 bombs filled with anthrax spores were produced at what was then called Camp Detrick. Two workers there died from exposure to anthrax in the 1950s. Another died in 1964 from viral encephalitis.

Fort Detrick is one of only two U.S. facilities with "Biohazard Level 4" maximum-containment germ laboratories. The others are at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Scientists work to fight such deadly diseases as Ebola, Rift Valley fever, Lassa fever, Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever and the Machupo virus.

The tightly sealed labs have negative air flow, and researchers wear baby-blue, spacesuit-like pressurized garb and breathe filtered air when they work inside.

In the event that a researcher is accidentally infected, he or she can be treated in a special isolation chamber known as "the Slammer." The last time it was used for employees was in the mid-1980s as a precaution.

Bonnie Duggan, who lives six houses from Ivins's house, remembered a time six years ago that seemed to illustrate just how careful he had learned to be.

She asked to borrow his chain saw to cut down trees along her back fence. Ivins wanted to do it himself.

"He came down here dressed like an ad from Black and Decker," she said, recalling his hard hat, ear protection, goggles and overalls. "I thought, 'This just must be the way he is in his lab,' taking every precaution."

As for the base, she said, "he was always very sensitive to Fort Detrick being cast in any negative light."