Why Dismantlement? Why Now?

Plans are underway at the National Cancer Institute’s Frederick campus to dismantle and remove Building 470, a Cold War era structure that NCI inherited from the Army. Dismantling could begin as early as summer 2003, after appropriation of funds and final selection of a demolition contractor.

“Our plan is to redevelop the campus with more efficient laboratories and make better use of the National Cancer Institute’s land at Fort Detrick,” explains Dr. Robert Wiltrout, Associate Director of the National Cancer Institute at Frederick. “It’s time to clear away many of these old World War II structures that have become inefficient and ill-suited to modern cancer research.”

NCI engineers have followed and documented the slow deterioration of Building 470 over several years. “When our colleagues in Bethesda saw the rusting and decaying interior beams and the buckling brick façade, they agreed it was time to bring the building down in a gentle, controlled manner,” said Dr. Craig Reynolds, NCI-Frederick’s Director of the Office of Scientific Operations. “Since it’s in such close proximity to several other buildings, we certainly don’t want it to come down of its own accord.”

Relic from a Different Era
The Army completed Building 470 in 1953, as a pilot plant for small-scale production of bacterial agents in the Army’s biological warfare research program. Until the mid-1960s, Army scientists in 470 produced Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax, and, from 1965 until 1968, continued laboratory-scale research. In 1969, when President Nixon declared that the United States would unilaterally withdraw from the biological arms race, he turned over buildings from the Army’s biological warfare program at Fort Detrick to the National Institutes of Health for cancer research.

The Army finished decontamination and decommissioning of Building 470 in 1971, and declared it safe for occupancy – although not for renovation – by those who had not been immunized against anthrax. In fact, many of the World War II and Cold War era buildings that house the NCI-Frederick today have origins similar to that of 470. In spite of having received the same caveat on renovation as did Building 470, many of those buildings have been safely renovated at various times over the past thirty years by workers who were not immunized against anthrax.

There were considerations of remodeling Building 470 as well, when NCI-Frederick first took possession of the building in 1988. But the building is unique: a seven-story tower whose configuration was dictated by the two 3,000-gallon, three-story high fermentors it housed. Several of the floors of the building are steel grating, so that someone on the fifth floor could have looked down upon colleagues three floors below. Remodeling such a building into updated laboratory and office space was deemed no easy or inexpensive task. Eventually all proposals were rejected as prohibitively costly for the amount of space that would be gained. So Building 470 has been vacant since 1971, serving only as storage space where employees have been able to stash their files or extra lab supplies.

By 1999, NCI engineers noted deterioration that could lead to structural instability, and the consensus was that the building should be razed. NCI-Frederick and NIH prepared the Environmental Assessment and historical documentation necessary to demolish Building 470, and, after the public comment periods, the state of Maryland approved removal of the building.

Myth or Truth?
Most who live in Frederick County have heard stories—many of them unnerving—about Building 470. Dr. George Anderson of Southern Research Institute, an internationally recognized expert on Bacillus anthracis, exhaustively reviewed documents on 470 and interviewed many of the men, some still residing in Frederick, who had worked in the building.

“We can put the most frightening of those urban legends to rest,” said Dr. Anderson. He learned that no one working in Building 470 died of anthrax, although three workers elsewhere on Fort Detrick died of infection with the agents that were being researched as biological weapons. The records show that two men working in other buildings died of inhalation anthrax, and one died of Bolivian hemorrhagic fever.

The Spill
Many people have heard that there was a large spill in Building 470. In 1958, a technician, trying to pry open a stuck valve at the bottom of a 3000-gallon fermentor, unintentionally released approximately two thousand gallons of liquid Bacillus anthracis culture. Because of the design of the building and the safety measures in place, the technician was able to isolate the spill to one room. There was no contamination of Fort Detrick or the community, and no one, including the technician, became ill. The outcome of the story is testament to the effective biological safety practices that were pioneered during those early days at Fort Detrick.

Dismantling in 2003
“What all this means for our task at hand is that we have a building that is safe to take down,” explains Carol Shearer, the 470 Project Engineer and an expert in dismantling former bioweapons facilities in the former Soviet Union. It was thoroughly decontaminated over thirty years ago, and the success of that decontamination verified when over 1300 samples, taken in hard-to-reach places, were negative for any trace of Bacillus anthracis. The success of the decontamination was again verified in October of 2002, when tests on an additional 790 samples revealed no trace of live or dead Bacillus anthracis. The samples were analyzed by either conventional culture methods or by polymerase chain reaction, a more sensitive test involving DNA.

In addition, in 2000, a panel of experts in biological safety from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University Medical School and Scientific Applications International Corporation examined the original decontamination data. They determined that workers involved in the dismantling would not need to be immunized for anthrax.

“Our main concern, then, is not anthrax, but noise and vibration – and most importantly the disruption of science in the adjoining and adjacent buildings,” says Shearer. Before dismantling begins, a web site for updates on the schedule will be up and running for employees to check, so that they can minimize any adverse effects on their work.

NCI-Frederick has a number of safeguards built into the dismantling process. As it proceeds, there will be ongoing sampling of the air for contaminants. In any operation likely to produce dust, the dust will be controlled with an environmentally friendly substance. Moreover, NCI, mindful of Frederick’s recent water crisis, is requiring that the demolition contractor provide any water to be used on the project. There will be briefings for employees as often as necessary and a telephone information line.

When all is said and done, NCI-Frederick leadership expect that the dismantlement will have been an inconvenience, rather than a biohazard. Unfortunately, demolishing Building 470 will mean fewer parking spaces and more noise, vibration and construction traffic for approximately eight months. At the end of the project, though, the specter of a bygone era will be put to rest along with the myth that surrounded it.

Meet the 470 Project Team:

Carol Shearer is the Project Manager for demolishing building 470. She has a B. Sc. in Electrical Engineering, and is a registered nurse. Ms Shearer was the Subproject Manager for dismantling the Biomedpreparat facilities in Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan. These facilities were the former Soviet Union’s anthrax production plant and had the capacity to store 500 metric tonnes of anthrax powder. As the Project Engineer she also had responsibilities for biosecurity and biosafety issues in the former biological weapons laboratories in Russia and Kazakhstan. Prior to this she developed and implemented the medical program for the construction of the oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea, across Southern Russia. Ms Shearer was a safety officer for several years at the DOE, Hanford site. When she worked for a Research and Development company she was the Corporate Safety Administrator as well as an electrical design engineer.

Dr. George Anderson received his doctorate in immunology at The Johns Hopkins University. He is presently providing the Department of Defense with expertise in biological defense at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the International Science Technology Center at 13 former biological weapons facilities in Russia. Dr. Anderson is also providing biomedical, biosecurity, and biosafety expertise to Bechtel Corporation in their Biological Weapons Proliferation Prevention Project in the former Soviet Union. He has a combined 17 years of experience at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) including work involving anthrax. Dr. Anderson previously worked with the NCI Institutional Biological Safety Committee, and NCI safety personnel, when he provided oversight for production of an nonvirulent strain of B. anthracis in the Good Manufacturing Practices facility at NCI, Fort Detrick.

Dr. David Franz, Ph.D. DVM, served as Deputy Commander and then Commander of the USAMRIID and as Deputy Commander of the Army’s Medical Research Institute and Materiel Command. He has a total of 23 years within the Army Medical Research and Development Command. Dr. Franz was the Chief Inspector on three United Nations Special Commission biological warfare inspection missions to Iraq, and he was a technical adviser on long-term monitoring. He served as a member of the first two US/UK teams that visited Russia in support of the Trilateral Joint Statement on Biological Weapons and as a member of the Trilateral Experts’ Committee for BW negotiations. Dr. Franz demonstrates his concern for the environment and the people through his committee responsibilities including the National Research Council Committee on Biological Threats to Agriculture, Plants and Animals, and the Multisector Crisis Management Consortium. Professionally he has served on the Chemical-Biological Defense Technology Area Review and Assessment Board (DoD), and on the Defense Science Board for Homeland Defense: Intelligence, to name but a few. On a local level Dr. Franz volunteers his time to perform First Responder’s Training to the Frederick Police Department and the Fire Department. He is also known in the community through his appearances on CBS’s Primetime, ABC’s 20/20, and various National Public Radio stations for his biological defense expertise.

To learn more about anthrax: http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/anthrax/index.asp

Questions or comments on Building 470? Contact Cheryl Parrott, Director of Public Affairs at NCI-Frederick: parrottc@ncifcrf.gov or phone her at 301-846-5382.