Last Updated

09 Jan 2003

Source: Washington Post, March 17, 2002.

In Anthrax Crisis, Learning From Art

Credit Union at Brentwood Post Office Invokes Jimmy Stewart in Fight to Go On

By Steve Twomey, Washington Post Staff Writer

Nearly five months have slipped past, yet October's letters of bioterrorism still bedevil the days of Patricia Yates and her staff, and no end is in sight. They used to be just the Washington Postal Employees Federal Credit Union. Now, Yates said, they also carry "the dubious distinction of being the anthrax credit union."

The only office was inside the Brentwood postal facility, in Northeast Washington, and it served some 4,800 workers, retirees and family members with car loans, home loans and daily banking. But when two envelopes stuffed with anthrax spores wended through the facility on the way to Capitol Hill -- leaking as they went, coating Brentwood's machinery with invisible hazards, closing the place to this day -- team Yates was forced into the street, without computers, furniture, telephones or membership records.

And without the $250,000 in the credit union safe.

That amount of money was usually kept on hand. Most members have their paychecks deposited electronically to credit union accounts and, come payday, make cash withdrawals.

Even so, retrieving the $250,000 wasn't Yates's first priority in those first days of disruption. Getting Cipro was. Yates, the credit union president, and her 10-member staff knew they might have inhaled spores, just as the entire Brentwood workforce might have, just as two postal workers (case 15 and case 16) who died most certainly did. So Yates joined the lines at D.C. General Hospital to get preventive medicine.

Nor in the blur of weeks that ensued did she worry much about the abandoned quarter-million. It was safe in the safe, in a quarantined building awaiting cleansing. She had so much else to worry about: finding new quarters, finding furniture and supplies, finding a way to access computer files, arranging with other institutions to cash paychecks, telling members where the credit union's emergency offices were.

Remember Jimmy Stewart in "It's a Wonderful Life," trying to keep his little building and loan open? Yates said he was her model. Keep open, keep going.

"See this paper clip?"

Yates, sitting at a donated desk in the two-story building on New York Avenue NE that the credit union now calls home, held one up. She had no paper clips after the credit union fled Brentwood. Along with everything else, she had to find some. Having something so mundane and simple "means a lot more to me now," Yates said.

Before New York Avenue, the credit union had three other temporary quarters. None was right or lasted long, in one case because its hosts asked it to move, fearing that credit union members might infect them with anthrax. Phone workers rigging lines for one of the emergency offices got nervous, too, Yates said. It was as if postal workers had become lepers.

"It was extremely hurtful," Yates said, recalling the day the credit union was declared non grata by that one host and she had to inform her members. "It was hurtful to me to stand outside and tell them they could not come in."

Around the holidays, Yates said, she got a telephone call from a hazardous materials official of the U.S. Postal Service: Could she please provide the combination to her safe, the one inside Brentwood? Everything in it has to be removed and sent away for decontamination, the caller said.

Including the $250,000.

The thought of strangers taking so much credit union money, without her present, was deeply troubling, Yates said. But she could hardly refuse.

Dennis Baca, the manager of environmental management policy for the Postal Service, said that "we made the decision early on that anything in the building would be considered suspect." Since October, Baca said, the Postal Service has "erred on the side of caution on everything we've done." So little is known about the behavior of anthrax spores that even cash in a sealed safe was not considered beyond their reach. "We were dealing with an aerosolized anthrax... . Nobody could tell us what it would do or not do," Baca said.

Placed in the custody of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the $250,000 was given the same decontamination treatment as mail recovered from Brentwood: irradiation at a private facility. When the credit union's money returned to Washington, the Postal Service kept custody; Yates had no place to secure so much. But she has since seen the $250,000, she said, and it looks quite normal. She had feared discoloration or brittleness, the fate of much of the irradiated mail.

It was during this period that the credit union's board decided that even when decontaminated and returned to its control, the $250,000 would never be used again, Yates said. Postal workers had been through so much -- the deaths of colleagues, Cipro, the disruption of operations -- that handing them Brentwood money, however clean it was, would not help their anxieties.

"So we would simply give it to the Federal Reserve," Yates said. She paused, and caught herself. "Simply? Boy, did we find that was not the case."

Before it would accept the $250,000 for destruction and before it would add that much in return to the credit union's Fed account, the Federal Reserve's branch in Baltimore wanted assurances in writing that irradiation had taken place, and then it would have its own medical experts review those assurances.

That did not reflect distrust of the Postal Service or the credit union, said Thomas L. Lavelle, a spokesman for the Federal Reserve's Financial Services. It reflected the times. Lavelle said the Fed routinely destroys money tainted by other things -- blood, for instance. But nobody in the country, no institution, had ever dealt with anthrax contamination on this scale.

The Fed's anthrax-related steps were taken "because we believe it's the right thing and the prudent thing, under the circumstances," Lavelle said. And Baca said the Fed was not alone in seeking explanations from the Postal Service about what was being done with tainted checks, money or mail.

So Yates has been trying to get a letter from the Postal Service about irradiation, so she can give it to the Fed. She is more than a bit frustrated that postal workers are handling irradiated mail every day, yet the Fed wants written details in order to destroy irradiated money.

She could be doing things with that $250,000. Investing it. Earning interest. The crisis has cost the credit union $100,000 and counting, Yates said, largely because it now must pay for its office space, whereas the Postal Service simply gave it space in Brentwood. The money is just "sitting there, doing nothing. And that violates common sense," Yates said.

Late Friday, she said, someone from the Federal Reserve called to say that if she simply wrote a letter on credit union stationery stating that the $250,000 had been rendered safe, that would be good enough. She would not have to receive such a letter from the Postal Service and then pass it on.

"I feel a bit relieved," Yates said.

The credit union's quarters are still temporary, though. It's losing members because it's harder to find. It doesn't know when it will be able to move back into Brentwood. The letters of bioterrorism keep on hurting.