Standard Bearers

t was after midnight on Oct. 31, 2001, when Bert Coursey checked into the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Washington with a box of mail laced with surrogate anthrax spores tucked under his arm. The spores were those of a benign bacterium that looked and acted just like the disease-causing spores that had killed two city postal workers, hospitalized three others and caused a run on antibiotics across the region.

The hotel desk clerk probably didn't notice the unusual baggage. Coursey is a white-haired, genial man who isn't likely to arouse alarm, even in a city on edge on Halloween night. The career federal physicist was part of the round-the-clock scramble to restore confidence in the postal system and figure out how to sterilize contaminated mail without destroying it. Coursey was hoping to get a couple hours of sleep before he and his box of spore-laden mail were expected at the White House. Later, he would board a flight to Ohio, where he would begin scientific testing for a large-scale mail irradiation program.

Two days earlier, White House Science Adviser John Marburger had tapped Coursey and a handful of other federal scientists to figure out how to sterilize nearly 2 million pieces of quarantined mail that had been processed at postal facilities contaminated with anthrax spores. As director of the Ionizing Radiation Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Physics Laboratory in Gaithersburg, Md., Coursey was the perfect candidate for the job. His office had established the standards by which a plant operated by the Titan Corp. in Lima, Ohio, used electron beams to sterilize medical supplies and other products. Now he would need to establish new standards for the plant to use in sterilizing mail. But first, he had to get his own box of mail, rigged with bacillus globigii spores and dosimeters for measuring radiation doses, to the facility to begin the laborious mathematical modeling process that would provide the basis for new calibrations.

"At that point, no one was going to get on a United Airlines plane with a box of spores and say 'Don't worry. They're just harmless spores.' "After the Defense Department turned down a request to fly the scientists and their test spores to Ohio, the White House ordered one of its own planes into service for the mission. "Everything happened really fast," Coursey recalls. "But we knew that was just to answer the question, 'Is this a safe process?' Then we needed to find out, 'Is this the best way to do it?' That led to a host of more detailed measurements that are maybe not as exciting, but they require an awful lot of work."

Just days later, the Postal Service found another plant, operated by Ion Beam Applications (IBA) in Bridgeport, N.J., that could also irradiate mail. But IBA's irradiation method was about 10 times more powerful than the Ohio plant's method, and the work shifted to the New Jersey facility.

"With 10 times more power, you can get mail through 10 times faster, but you're depositing so much energy so quickly, it's a very delicate process. You can destroy the mail in that process, and I've got many examples of that," Coursey says. In some cases, the mail irradiation program started small fires at the New Jersey plant. "Basically, if you put a blow torch on paper long enough, it will set it on fire," Coursey says. Indeed, NIST's own mail was caught up in the anthrax quarantine. "We've done our own quality control here," says Coursey, holding up a handful of singed envelopes.

NIST was able to establish new standards for the New Jersey plant, which solved most of the problems. Coursey's team also developed a way to irradiate packages-which couldn't be penetrated by the electron-beam processes used at both the Ohio and New Jersey plants-using X-ray technology. In addition, NIST scientists are continuing to analyze the byproducts of the irradiation programs, to ensure no harmful chemicals are produced.

"A lot of very detailed work has gone into this," Coursey says. "A lot of sophisticated modeling and a lot of just good practical engineering." Mail is still being irradiated for selected zip codes in Washington, and NIST is working with the Postal Service on the design of a new irradiation facility in the city.

GRATIFYING WORK

The mail irradiation program, which continues today, is just one of many behind-the-headlines homeland security programs in which scientists from NIST are playing a critical role. For more than a century, NIST, formerly the National Bureau of Standards, has been conducting the science that establishes the standards that touch nearly every aspect of life and work in America, from the doses of radiation in medical X-rays, to the broadcast frequencies used by radio stations, to the level of protection in bullet-resistant vests used by police officers. If it can be measured and certified, NIST scientists are probably involved in it.

Coursey's division is more commonly identified with setting dental X-ray and mammography standards than with preventing terrorism. From his office two floors above the machine that calibrates the equipment used in 11,000 mammography clinics across the country, he recounts his thoughts after the Sept. 11 attacks. "We recognized from the start that the detection of nuclear materials and dirty bombs is something of great importance," he says.

At the same time NIST was conducting the mail irradiation work, Coursey began working with the White House to combat nuclear smuggling. He pulled together people from the division's radioactivity and neutron measurement groups to begin developing the standards for detecting and interdicting radiological materials. "This turns out to be something of much greater importance to the White House right now, and this has involved the rest of my time," Coursey says. "We were already going as fast as we could with mail irradiation. Now we have a separate team developing standards for detecting and interdicting radiological material."

"Customs has one set of technology, the Border Patrol has a different set, the New York Fire Department has a different set and so on. What we did is brought people from all these communities and looked at what are the common needs for standards of radiation measurement technology for homeland security," he says.

"It's a very daunting task."

As intimidating as the challenge is, NIST is probably better suited to the work than any other agency. For decades the agency's scientists have been measuring radioactivity for all nuclear medicine applications, environmental chemistry applications and nuclear power plant quality controls. The medical and manufacturing equipment often cited as potential sources of radioactive material for terrorists is familiar to Coursey and his colleagues. "If it's radioactive, we've seen it," he says.

Working through the White House Office of Homeland Security with scientists from other federal agencies and the private sector, NIST is developing a consumer guide for radiation-detection devices on the market. "There's a great sense of urgency here. The trade-off is doing what we can as quickly as possible yet still [maintain] the proper standards that we have confidence in. Time is my biggest challenge right now," he says.

As exhausting as the workload has been since Sept. 11, it has been rewarding. "When you work for 30 years doing your quiet role in measurement standards and then it's needed, it's gratifying," he says.

HELPING FIRST RESPONDERS

NIST's role in homeland security is not new. Since 1999, the agency's Office of Law Enforcement Standards has been developing new terrorism-related standards and certification programs for the personal protective equipment used by law enforcement personnel, firefighters, hazardous materials workers and other emergency response personnel.

"The first problem that surfaced was that the state and local folks want to buy equipment but they don't know what equipment to buy. Every salesman tells you his equipment is the best. But there's no way [the buyer] can tell," says Alim Fatah, a program manager in the law enforcement standards office.

Working through a program funded by the Justice Department's National Institute of Justice, NIST surveyed law enforcement and first responder organizations to develop the criteria for setting equipment standards. Looking at factors such as performance requirements, durability, maintainability, power requirements and cost, NIST developed a set of parameters and technical requirements. The result was a collection of guides for first responders that covered five types of equipment: chemical detection, biological agent detection, personal protection, communications and decontamination.

"These guides were a temporary solution," Fatah says. "At least the emergency responders can go look at these guides and see what will meet certain performance requirements, depending on what you need in terms of cost, capability and so on."

Much more difficult will be establishing the actual performance standards and then certifying the equipment. There are literally hundreds of parameters to consider in developing standards, says Philip Mattson, another program manager in NIST's law enforcement standards office. For example, consider the factors in determining an appropriate amount of a particular chemical to be used in testing chemical-protective equipment. The means by which a chemical agent is dispersed and the location in which it is dispersed will result in tremendous variations in the concentration of the chemical. A chemical dispersed in a football stadium will behave differently from one dispersed in another public building, for example. Wearers need to know how their equipment will perform in different circumstances.

"A lot of people wonder why the first responders don't just use equipment that's been developed for the military to protect against chemical warfare agents," says Mattson. "The military generally operates outside, so the actual field concentrations of these agents is going to be much lower generally than they would be for an emergency worker who may be responding to a device that was detonated in a sports complex. Also, the military is trained to move away from this stuff, to avoid it. The first responders don't necessarily have that choice. Plus, first responders have to comply with federal health and safety regulations, and the military does not," he says.

Additionally, the population of civilians who may need chemical protective gear is much more varied than the military population, which is primarily young, male and at the peak of physical health.

THREAT ANALYSIS

Working through an interagency advisory board, NIST has made the development of standards and certification programs for gas masks and personal protective equipment a top priority in its law enforcement program.

"The area of greatest concern was whether or not their primary means of defense-their self-contained breathing apparatus-would protect them if they were responding to a chemical warfare incident," Mattson says. "They know that it works against toxic industrial chemicals because they've been responding to those kinds of incidents for years. But chemical warfare agents are different," he says.

Much of the agency's work in this area is classified. "Basically, you look at certain scenarios and determine what agents you are likely to encounter and what level of protection you would need," says Fatah. Most of the research and testing is done in military laboratories, which can use controlled chemicals under high security. Using intelligence assessments, NIST has developed models to assess the risk posed by various chemicals to law enforcement, fire and rescue personnel and other emergency responders. Based on that analysis, standards predicated on different scenarios will be established.

"It's not like there's no equipment out there at all and it's a total disaster out there," says Fatah. "But the equipment that is out there hasn't been tested or verified to meet the new threat. They don't know if their masks work against mustard gas because they've never been tested. It's that sort of situation." Complicating matters is the fact that testing equipment using controlled agents is highly limited due to safety and security concerns. To help manufacturers, NIST also is working to identify surrogate agents that can be more easily used in the manufacturing and development process.

NIST has developed a five-year proposal to fully fund the equipment program for first responders. The work will include standards development, threat analyses, test protocols, testing and certification of equipment, certification of the test laboratories themselves, a follow-on surveillance program, and the creation of selection, care and maintenance guides. The estimated price: $85 million over five years.

Like other federal agencies, NIST and its partners are operating in an uncertain funding environment because Congress failed to complete action on fiscal 2003 spending bills before adjourning in November. What is certain, however, is that the program is a top priority for first responders.

"There are a lot of people out there trying to make a buck," says Mattson. "There's a lot of old military surplus equipment out there that may not work. The filters may be out of date, there's no instructions on how to don it properly, it may be 40 years old. There's a lot of that kind of stuff out there and it's all the more important that this work continues so that we have the standards in place so people can make appropriate decisions on what to buy."