Last Updated

17 Jun 2003

Source: Washington Post, January 23, 2002.

'It's Good to Be Back': Senators Return to Hart

Offices Reopen After 96-Day Anthrax Quarantine

By Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post Staff Writer

Picture frames were dusted. Office desktops were wiped clean. Only the neatly stacked newspapers from Oct. 15 seemed out of place, the ones with the prescient headline: "Hill Braces for Anthrax Threat."

Senators and their staffs returned to the Hart Senate Office Building yesterday at the end of a 96-day quarantine, reclaiming a Capitol Hill landmark after the largest response to a bioterror attack in U.S. history.

"It's good to be back," said Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), who walked back into the nine-story marble and glass building shortly after noon. He was accompanied by staff members who were present Oct. 15 when a colleague opened an unsigned letter that contained an estimated two grams of anthrax spores -- enough for 200 million lethal doses.

"It's good to be confident that we can return to normalcy," Daschle said.

The homecoming felt at times like opening a time capsule, or revisiting a crime scene.

"I left my fountain pen," said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), who was seated at his seventh-floor desk -- from which he had thought he would be away for only a day or two. He tried the blue ink, with no luck, remarking quietly: "It's pretty much dried out."

Dorgan aide Barry Piatt returned to find his Cipro antibiotics -- five 500-milligram pills in a plastic bag -- exactly where he had left them, forgotten on his desk when the building was evacuated. "It's like seeing the wreckage of the Titanic," Piatt said.

The 50 senators with offices in the million-square-foot building were allowed to return yesterday to suites that were by all accounts cleaner than before the Oct. 17 shutdown. Daschle will work out of temporary offices in Hart until his suite is refurbished in a cleanup that will cost at least $20 million.

The attack exposed 23 people to anthrax bacteria. Thousands were treated with antibiotics, and more than 3,000 workers were displaced. Two U.S. Postal Service workers were killed, apparently by exposure to the spores as the Trenton, N.J.-postmarked Daschle letter moved through the Brentwood sorting facility in Northeast Washington.

Investigators have announced no suspects in the case.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention certified the Hart Building's safety last week. As many as 200 workers at a time worked to decontaminate the structure, pioneering the use of chlorine dioxide gas to disinfect the two-story Daschle suite and a related ventilation system, said EPA on-site coordinator Rich Rupert.

Teams of technical workers, often working in protective suits, extensively cleaned other spots where traces of anthrax bacteria were detected, including the offices of 12 other senators. The final decision to reopen relied on results from roughly 4,000 test strips and 5,111 culture samples taken throughout the building, officials said.

"People should feel comfortable and confident about reentering the building," said Patrick J. Meehan, director of the division of emergency and environmental health systems for the Atlanta-based CDC. "Every room was tested."

But not all was back to normal. Daschle spoke near his temporary offices in Hart. His permanent offices, in the heart of the building's southeastern quadrant, will not be ready until mid-March.

Daschle's office was widely contaminated before fumigation. The suite has been stripped bare to gray concrete floors and white plaster walls, with internal walls and ceiling tiles removed to expose light fixtures and ducts. Senators said the purpose was to reassure employees that the suite was clean and to take new security measures.

"I feel completely safe," said Daschle, who added that no member of his staff quit because of the anthrax attack. "I think we've done everything possible to remediate this building. And I believe it has been a complete success."

Several other senators with treated offices did not move back immediately, although officials said their suites would be operational shortly after Congress returns to session tomorrow.

"I go in with confidence and a prayer," Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) told the Associated Press.

"We're very excited to be back in," said Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.). "The important message was sent over the three-month period when we didn't allow the impairment of this building to stop the proper functioning of the Senate."

The cleanup did not go without a hitch, however. The EPA has estimated that it alone has spent $13.3 million and has told Senate officials it expects the cost to climb to $20 million. The Senate has begun an inquiry.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, called Friday for an accounting of the hiring and payment of contractors.

"I am concerned about the fiscal integrity of this operation," Grassley said in letters to EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Alfonso E. Lenhardt, acknowledging that the cleanup was a "massive undertaking."

According to a list that Grassley's office received from the EPA, contractors on the project as of Dec. 13 were Camp, Dresser & McKee Inc.; Dyncorp; IT Corp.; Ecology and Environment Inc.; General Physics; Kemron Inc.; Sabre Environmental Technologies Inc.; Southwest Research Laboratories; Tetra Tech; the University of California at Berkeley; and Roy F. Weston Inc.

On-site coordinator Rupert and an EPA spokeswoman declined comment on the letter, saying Whitman would respond soon.