Last Updated

17 Jun 2003

Source: Washington Post, January 30, 2002.

A Recipe for Safe Mail

Letters to Government Culled, Wrapped, Baked

By Steve Twomey, Washington Post Staff Writer

Baked at 175 degrees, the government's mail must be set out to breathe these days, like an opened bottle of wine. So the letters rest for hours in circus-like tents in the parking lot of the shuttered Brentwood postal facility, purging themselves of gases that have accumulated during sanitization.

When finally delivered to the White House, Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court and the federal departments, the irradiated missives are in altered states. In color: They can seem faded, as if left in the sun or dispatched in Lincoln's time. In texture: They are drier -- "crispy," as some recipients put it. Some detect an odor as well, as if something has burned, although the U.S. Postal Service sprays the letters with something "like Febreze for mail," one official said.

The mail is 72 hours late, too. Or, rather, 72 hours later than it would have been in times less troubled.

But millions of potentially fatal anthrax spores mailed in everyday envelopes to the Senate last fall have forced the Postal Service to erect a fire wall for the federal government's executive, legislative and judicial branches. It is an up-from-nothing system of culling, wrapping, boxing, long-distance trucking and parking-lot venting whose coup de grace is, literally, electron death rays that cook the mail, and any living organism in it.

"We didn't rewrite the book," said Thomas G. Day, the Postal Service's vice president for engineering. "We wrote it."

The shield reflects how costly bioterror-by-mail has been in lives, time and dollars, and how extensive the response. Congress has awarded the Postal Service $500 million to cleanse its facilities of anthrax spores and plan the detection and removal of future bio-threats, not just to the government's mail but to everyone's. Irradiating all mail is possible, although no plan has been approved.

"My feeling is that is certainly on their minds," said Mark Corallo, spokesman for the House Government Reform Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Postal Service.

After the anthrax assault of October, during which both federal and nonfederal mail was exposed to contamination and impounded, the Postal Service attacked the backlog with irradiation. Treated mail from that time -- in which two Brentwood employees died of inhalation anthrax and two others became seriously ill -- continues to arrive at homes and offices in the city like canceled time capsules.

That cleanup, however, did not remove the problem. The perpetrator of the Brentwood incident remains unknown and uncaught; the federal government remains a tempting target of terror. So the Postal Service has decided that mail destined for Zip codes that begin 202, 203, 204 and 205 -- Zip codes that serve only the federal government, and only in the capital -- should be sanitized as a matter of routine. The government's tens of thousands of workers locally have noticed.

"It looks like parchment," said Frank Quimby, a spokesman for the Department of Interior. "Some of it is so dry it crumbles sometimes. On a more serious note, we're finding that stuff people send us -- disks, slides, film -- some of it is being damaged beyond the point of usability."

More serious still, some postal workers and staff members in several Capitol Hill offices have reported nausea, rashes, headaches and a metallic taste, enough so that studies are underway to determine the links, if any, to irradiated mail. To allay fears, the Postal Service is scheduled today to hold a briefing to explain what it is doing to the mail, firmly asserting there is no risk to health.

"We are obviously concerned about reports of postal workers and government employees who deal with the mail not feeling very well," Corallo said. "But we do understand that the Postal Service is dealing with something that none of us have ever had to deal with before, and they have been forced to do something very quickly that will ensure that the mail is not carrying anthrax or any other deadly chemicals."

Each day, hundreds of thousands of pieces of federal mail -- the Postal Service could not provide a better estimate -- arrive at a processing center in Landover. There are constituent letters to the president or members of Congress; legal papers for the Justice Department or the Supreme Court; complaints, reports or inquiries headed to agencies; magazines and newspapers and packages addressed to all three branches.

Scientists told the Postal Service it could take months to hone a sanitation system for this mail, Day said, but there was no time to test, study, retest and restudy what to do, not with so much mail pouring in. So, by November, the Postal Service had settled on irradiation, a common method of ensuring the safety of food and medical equipment. It would use electron beams at two private facilities, one in Lima, Ohio, owned by Titan Corp., and one in Bridgeport, N.J., run by Ion Beam Applications Inc. No one knew the minimum amount of energy needed to kill anthrax en masse like this, Day said, so the Postal Service opted for huge doses to be safe.

Now, every day, a couple of tractor-trailers depart the Brentwood parking lot in Northeast Washington to make either the three-hour journey to Bridgeport or the nine-hour one to Lima. Not all mail bound for a federal Zip code in the capital makes the trip. Much of it is deemed safe because the sender is deemed reliable, so it is simply sent on its way. A magazine, for example, might not be irradiated.

But all mail addressed to the White House, the Senate or the House, whether from a reliable sender or not, and any mail headed elsewhere in the federal universe from a less-reliable source is hand-wrapped in plastic at Brentwood and sealed in a box to keep it from spilling during its voyage. All told, 300,000 to 350,000 pieces of mail a day must be irradiated.

Once in Ohio or New Jersey, the boxes are loaded onto conveyor belts and zapped with electrons once, turned upside down and zapped again. Only envelopes and what the Postal Service calls "flats" -- the familiar, thin document envelopes -- are processed this way, because the electron beam cannot penetrate large packages deeply enough. Such packages have been held for months while the Postal Service develops an X-ray system, Day said. That system is being tested now and should clear up the backlog within a matter of days after implementation, he said.

The electron stream "takes care of a very full array of bioterror agents" that might be present in the mail, Day said. But so much energy is used to render the mail safe that the process produces ozone and carbon monoxide, largely because of interaction between the electrons and the plastic wrap. After being reloaded and trucked back to Brentwood, therefore, the mail is removed from the boxes and plastic and allowed to air in the tents for as long as 48 hours before reentering the usual mail delivery system.

Despite such precautions, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) called last week in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) for stepped-up monitoring of mail that has been irradiated, saying that members of her staff and others have experienced a wide array of minor medical problems.

Postal officials acknowledge that irradiated mail can cause nausea and other problems, but only if not properly vented before delivery. At their briefing today, they will try to "clear up the notion that the mail is causing people to get sick," said Deborah K. Willhite, a senior vice president.

William Burrus, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents about half of the 800,000 postal workers nationwide, said yesterday that irradiation is an "overreaction." Heightened vigilance after the October attack, as well as other new procedures in mail processing, have rendered the system safer than ever, Burrus said.