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Commanding

January 5, 2003 1:07 am

JOHN H. BRIDGES III was headed for a relaxing Sunday of bass fishing on Aquia Creek when his boss called about anthrax contamination in their workplace.

That was 14 months ago, and the Aquia Harbour resident hasn't been out on his bass boat since.

Bridges, 47, has logged more than 4,100 hours as incident commander at what is believed to be the largest cleanup operation ever of the potentially deadly bacteria--the Brentwood postal facility in northeast Washington.

The decontamination of the 17.5 million-cubic-foot structure means Bridges also hasn't seen much of his two sons--one in high school, the other in elementary--or his wife.

"I give them a lot of credit for their patience and understanding," he said during a recent interview.

Bridges, who grew up in Florida, got his start in the environmental engineering field as a Marine stationed in California. He finished his career as a gunnery sergeant at Quantico Marine Corps Base and then spent two years as a consultant before hooking up with the U.S. Postal Service in 1996.

Until October 2001, his duties as supervisor of environmental activities for postal facilities in Maryland, Washington and Northern Virginia revolved around stormwater permits, hazardous-waste disposal (usually inks), an occasional asbestos issue and making sure employees had safe drinking water.

But one week after Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy received anthrax-laced mail on Capitol Hill, his focus dramatically shifted.

On Oct. 21, 2001--the day Bridges was called away from his Stafford County fishing outing--the Brentwood facility was shut down.

By then, offices on Capitol Hill also had been closed and a handful of postal employees had turned up ill with flulike symptoms.

Before it was over, two postal employees were dead as a result of their exposure at Brentwood and at least two others--including Leroy Richmond of North Stafford--were critically ill.

Three months ago, the Brentwood facility was renamed The Joseph Curseen Jr. and Thomas Morris Jr. Processing and Distribution Center in honor of the two workers who died.

Since the decontamination process began, Bridges has been in and out of the two-story brick building several times a week--to check progress of fumigation preparation, run tests and gather samples.

He said he never feared for his safety because of the on-site precautions and the protective gear each person wears.

"With all the training going on and all the equipment, I wasn't concerned at all," Bridges said.

But he did do his homework.

"I'm somewhat meticulous when it comes to process and procedures," he said.

Bridges, like the rest of the 200 people working on the decontamination project, has been on a continuous regimen of antibiotics--Cipro the first two months and then the lower-dose medication doxycycline.

Everyone who enters the building also wears what Bridges calls a "moon suit"--a double-layered outfit that stretches head to toe and includes a full-face mask, breathing apparatus and steel-toed boots.

The biggest impact on Bridges' health--apart from a lack of sleep from the workload--has been a rash under his arms and elsewhere that was deemed a side effect of the medication and irritation from wearing the heavy protective gear during 100-degree days last summer.

Bridges said his first concern after undertaking the project was getting the building tightly sealed. Every window, door, pipe and vent was covered, and workers used thermal imaging to make sure it was airtight.

The focus then moved to carefully controlling access to the site.

The biggest challenge, however, was "the uncertainties of anthrax itself," Bridges said. The team of scientists and engineers involved in the project gathered 9,900 environmental samples prior to starting the actual fumigation.

The concern for workers and the surrounding community was so great they even tested 48 rodents found on site to be sure they weren't carrying the bacteria. All those tests proved negative.

Though the building was completely sealed within a few months, the actual fumigation--the process by which the anthrax was killed--didn't occur until last month.

The 14 months leading up to that were spent setting up--getting the five chemicals that would be mixed to kill the bacteria, securing the equipment to do the fumigation and running 25,000 feet of flexible plastic tubing to deliver the chemicals and then remove the gas.

To kill the anthrax, contractors used 2,000 pounds of chlorine dioxide gas at a concentration of 750 parts per million and kept the building at 75 degrees and 75 percent relative humidity for 12 hours.

Employees monitored the process from a trailer, using infrared cameras to keep a constant watch on such things as temperature, humidity, gas concentrations and atmospheric pressure. Fifty air monitors were set up inside and another 26 were placed outside. The workers also used two mobile units from the Environmental Protection Agency to monitor air outside the facility.

"We were building it from the ground up," Bridges said of the lengthy preparations. "Nothing of this size has ever been done before."

Even before the Hart Senate Office Building--where the anthrax-contaminated letters were delivered--was fumigated, test runs were carried out at the Brentwood site. A trailer was outfitted like a senator's office--complete with leather chair, desk and curtains--for a trial run.

Postal officials also successfully decontaminated the machine--Delivery Bar Code Sorter 17--that processed the contaminated letters at Brentwood.

Throughout the project, Bridges said, postal officials were told the process wouldn't work, that they'd blow up the building or seep dangerous gas into the community.

"We've taken a lot of criticism over the past year--'You don't have the right approach, the right concentrations'--but I think we've proved most of them wrong," he said. "And, hopefully, the environmental samples will be the final proof."

After the building was fumigated the weekend of Dec. 14, 8,000 strip samples were taken from throughout the structure. Another 4,000 samples will be taken by mid-January.

Once every sample is analyzed, the results will be reviewed by a panel made up of scientists from the District of Columbia's health department, the EPA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute.

If live bacteria are found anywhere, there will be either spot cleaning or a repeat of the entire process until sampling shows all bacteria have been killed. Afterward, the Postal Service will begin refurbishing the building in preparation for employees to return--possibly in April.

Officials know that will be a step fraught with challenges.

Making employees comfortable returning to the workplace where their colleagues were stricken will require not only assurances of their safety but some psychological boosts as well, said Tom Day, vice president of engineering for the Postal Service.

A new, front-end bio-detection system will be in place when Brentwood reopens. Every postal facility is scheduled to get one over the next 18 months.

And at Brentwood, carpet is being pulled up, furniture replaced and walls painted.

"We want to put the building in the best possible condition so when employees come back, it's not only clean but looks nice," Day said.

When Bridges entered the building recently, he noticed what could be disturbing reminders of the last time employees worked there.

"When I went in the other day, calendars were still on October 2001, things were still in people's desks--what they were doing when the building was evacuated," he said.

When the building was closed, Bridges' crew inventoried personal belongings left inside employee lockers. Then, human-resources personnel made arrangements for anyone wanting items to retrieve them after decontamination.

Of the 1,612 employees, fewer than 100 wanted anything they'd left behind, Bridges said.

A few parcels required special care. Officials at the Smithsonian Institution wanted the exotic fish that were en route to them, a family wanted an urn that had been in transit and the vendors, Postal Service and employee credit union wanted the roughly $1 million in cash that was on site when the building closed.

But all requests came with a caveat; they asked that the items be delivered only after the building--and items--were cleaned.

"So there was a lot of things people didn't know that went on behind the scenes just to accommodate people's desires," Bridges said.

All in all, the experience was fascinating, Bridges reluctantly admitted. Members of the scientific community are already clamoring to hear about it and Bridges has agreed to six speaking engagements to share the lessons learned.

The Postal Service now has a plan--laid out in an 8-inch-thick document--in case it should ever happen again.

But Bridges is eager to have the anthrax decontamination behind him--and turn his attention once again to the bass in Aquia Creek.

"We didn't really want this role, but somebody had to take it," he said. "Hopefully, it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience."