Postal Service to begin cleaning contaminated mail facility next week

The Postal Service and public health officials on Monday will test their ability to decontaminate a large, anthrax-tainted mail processing plant in Northeast Washington. It's been nearly nine months since the Brentwood facility, which handles mail for the nation's capital, was contaminated by anthrax-laden letters. Two postal employees working in the plant died from exposure to the bacteria. The facility has been closed since last October. The agency will test its decontamination technique on a limited space in the huge facility, which measures 17.5 million cubic feet. The small area has been covered by a tent and contains contaminated mail-sorting machines. Chlorine dioxide will be pumped into the tent in an attempt to kill anthrax spores. It is the same compound that was used to clean the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill last fall. It will take seven to 10 days to get test results back and then another 20 days to analyze them, according to Ted Gordon, chief operating officer for the District's Department of Health. If the test is successful, officials will prepare the entire facility for cleaning. Once the Brentwood facility is cleaned, a team of local and federal public health officials and representatives of postal employee unions will study air samples before allowing any of the building's 1,800 workers back into the building. Tom Day, the Postal Service's vice president for engineering, said the test is necessary to "validate that everything is working." Efforts to clean the Hart building ran into several delays when health officials found they couldn't maintain the proper environmental controls to ensure that the chlorine dioxide would work. Gordon said they would apply lessons learned from that experience to Brentwood. "We will take as long as necessary to get it done right," Gordon said.