State Department begins cleaning mail facility

The State Department Monday outlined plans to decontaminate a departmental mail facility in Sterling, Va., where an employee contracted inhalational anthrax during last year's attacks.

In the first stage of the decontamination process, the State Department plans to remove most of the contents of the facility to reduce the amount of surface area that will need to be decontaminated, the department said in a press release. Selected heavily contaminated areas of the facility will then be cleaned with a chlorine solution, according to the department. As a final step, the entire facility is to be fumigated in the summer, the department said.

Some local officials criticized State for delaying cleanup for so long after the attacks. Officials believe the facility became contaminated when an anthrax-tainted letter sent to Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., was misdirected there, The Washington Post reported.

"Why has it taken so long to actually do something?" Loudoun County Supervisor James Burton asked yesterday during a meeting with U.S. officials. "We're looking at 2004. Why don't you do it rather than talk about it?" he asked.

The cleanup of the Sterling facility has been delayed, in part, by efforts to decontaminate State's diplomatic pouches and other mail facilities, U.S. officials said. Technicians used Sterling as a staging area to decontaminate more than 46,000 diplomatic pouches from U.S. missions around the world, officials said. The department also oversaw cleanup of more than 155 mailrooms in and outside the United States, the Post reported.