Postal officials await go-ahead to reopen Brentwood facility
Every window and door at the Joseph Curseen Jr. and Thomas Morris Jr. Processing and Distribution Plant is still covered and sealed. Nearly 25,000 feet of piping wind around and through the 17.5 million-square-foot mail center, located on Brentwood Road in Northeast Washington, just a few miles from the Capitol and downtown. More than 30 chemical tank trucks sit in the facility's massive parking lot.
The building, now named for the two postal employees who worked at the facility who died as a result of anthrax exposure in 2001, resembles a miniature chemical plant. Storage tanks filled with chlorine dioxide stand in the loading dock, where delivery trucks once made their stops. A chemical generating machine, shipped in from Dubai, rests idle.
Despite the fact that toxic chemicals surround the building, Tom Day seems surprisingly optimistic. Day, the Postal Service's vice president of engineering, is confident that the facility soon will be back in regular operation, full of Postal Service employees.
Day and his Postal Service colleagues are eagerly awaiting results from last weekend's attempt to clean the Brentwood Road building of any traces of anthrax. The facility has been closed for more than year after anthrax-laced letters processed there made their way to the Hart Senate Office Building. Touring the outside of the plant with reporters Thursday, Day said it will take 30 days to get test results back. A task force spearheaded by the Environmental Protection Agency is reviewing them.
On Dec. 14, the plant was pumped full of chlorine dioxide, the same compound used to treat the Hart building. Engineers then began collecting 8,000 "spore strips," designed to detect traces of anthrax, and 4,000 air and surface samples. If the tests show that the building is clean, it will still take the Postal Service several months to get the facility up and running again, Day said.
It took nearly a year to seal off the building and construct the mini-chemical plant. Taking it apart will take almost as much time. Then, the agency has to renovate the plant itself, including conducting routine maintenance on machines that have been idle for a year.
Much of the decontamination equipment will be transported to Trenton, N.J., to clean that city's contaminated postal distribution center. The Postal Service will spend roughly $150 million to get both buildings operational again. That includes decontamination, repair work and cosmetic improvements, such as painting the interiors. All the money is coming from an emergency appropriations bill passed by Congress earlier this year.
Once back on line, both facilities will be armed with new hazard detection equipment. The Postal Service has already installed such technology on automated mail-sorting machines in Baltimore and plans to roll it out to 14 more sites this spring. Day could not say how long it will take to equip all 200-plus processing and distribution facilities with the detection equipment.