Storming the Lab

The impact of Hurricane Ike on the research labs in the storm’s path is generating a small number of headlines. At the end of last week, Science reported on the state of things at the University of Texas Medical Branch:

The UTMB campus stands on the eastern portion of the island, behind the seawall the city constructed after a hurricane devastated the town in 1900. The wall held during Ike, sparing the campus much of the destruction experienced across the rest of Galveston, where whole neighborhoods washed away. Overall, Hurricane Ike killed 50 people in the Gulf Coast and left millions more without power for a week. But the Galveston National Laboratory, a $167 million facility designed for the study of biohazards, suffered minimal damage, says the lab’s associate director, James LeDuc. UTMB’s biosafety level 4 lab, which holds samples of microbes such as anthrax and plague bacteria, also emerged unscathed. Elsewhere on the island, Texas A&M University’s Galveston research facilities suffered virtually no damage, says campus CEO R. Bowen Loftin.

Before the storm, the bloggers at Effect Measure expressed severe skepticism about the logic of locating a lab with such deadly pathogens on a barrier island. Another ScienceBlogger at Corpus Callosum points out that while the Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases Biocontainment BSL-4 Lab was built to resist 140-mile-an-hour winds, other buildings in Galvenston were not. Storm damage elsewhere lead to a buildup of environmental hazards like “mud, human waste, asbestos, lead and gasoline,” that posed a severe risk to health of the city.

While the UTMB lab is secure, the campus has not reopened, and scientists, like so many other Galveston residents, cannot yet return to work.

Tags: biosecurity

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