N.C. making pitch to win coveted lab

In what amounts to a national beauty contest to host America's newest germ lab, dozens of heavy hitters from North Carolina will gather Tuesday hoping to impress officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

At stake is a $450 million biodefense lab, a facility that North Carolina officials would love to see built on the Umstead Research Farm in Butner, a 4,000-acre tract about 25 miles north of Raleigh.

The 520,000-square-foot lab -- about five times the size of most regular Wal-Marts -- would handle a wide range of pathogens that could be used as biological threats. About 10 percent of the lab would be specifically set aside for viruses with no known cures.

But the lab also promises up to 1,500 construction jobs, 500 permanent positions and the potential to become an international research hub. That possibility has triggered an intense competition among North Carolina, Mississippi, Kansas, Texas and Georgia. All were named finalists in July by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Officials from each state are keeping a close eye on one another. Some attend the others' hearings to pick up scraps of intelligence. All admit they comb Internet postings and news accounts. None of them can resist the chance to make a pitch.

"Sure this would be great for North Carolina, but more importantly, coming to North Carolina is what's best for the nation," said Kimrey Rhinehardt, vice president of federal relations for the University of North Carolina system.

Opponents have been largely absent from the hearings, partly because community support was one standard used to select finalists. That means North Carolina's hearing is likely to be dominated by a long list of supporting politicians, university officials and executives from high-profile companies.

Critics fear danger

A few people have questioned the facility. Hope Taylor-Guevara, director of the environmental group Clean Water for North Carolina, said she intends to formally oppose the lab at the hearing Tuesday.

And Louis Zeller of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League in Western North Carolina said his organization only recently began to research the project.

"The facility itself presents a real danger," Zeller said.

How much danger, however, is a matter of debate.

The lab requires the government's highest security rating, known as BSL-4. There are only a handful of level-four labs in the country, including labs in Maryland and Georgia. The proposed lab would replace a similar facility in Plum Island, N.Y., which is more than 50 years old.

The design of each lab depends on its use, said Jonathan Richmond, a biosafety consultant who has worked in the field for 30 years.

A level-four lab that handles only microbes, for example, is designed to physically separate workers and pathogens using lab boxes and gloves. It is sometimes referred to as a "bug in a box" lab and presents its own challenges when it comes to containing microbes.

"You can do limited work in there," said Richmond, who has designed biocontainment labs and wrote a widely used manual on the topic. "You certainly could not put a cow in such a thing. For that, you have to build very special, large rooms and put the worker inside a space suit." The lab proposed for Butner would work with large animals.

Richmond is among those supporting North Carolina's proposal.

The image of workers in space suits dealing with deadly pathogens was enough to trigger significant opposition in some states well before North Carolina made the list of finalists.

Level-four lab safety

To counter the concerns, supporters point to government reports that show no pathogens from a level-four 4 lab in the United States have ever spread to nearby communities.

Opponents just as quickly highlight accidents inside the labs -- some of which were not reported until well after they happened.

Texas A&M University at College Station, for example, was recently ordered to stop all research on its warfare microbes. Officials there acknowledge they failed to report two cases of accidental exposure of lab workers. Violations at Plum Island have been the topic of intense reviews.

Regardless of the site selected, Richmond thinks a good design can meet any safety concern.

"Problems can always be traced to maintenance," Richmond said. "If you maintain them properly, they don't have problems."

And maintenance, opponents charge, is only as good as the skills and efforts of employees.

Homeland Security has no interest in engaging this debate Tuesday. It will simply offer people a chance to speak and then move on to the next town. Once the hearings conclude, the department will hire contractors to conduct environmental reviews for each location.

Draft versions of that report are scheduled for release in the spring, which is the next time the government will seek public comment. A final decision is expected in late 2008. Construction, which is expected to take four years to complete, would begin in 2009.