You need to locate a laboratory that works with some of the deadliest diseases on the planet. So where do you locate it? Where else but on an unstable site in a hurricane zone – and then try to build it to withstand the local environment and hope that you succeeded.
Ebola Island – Pruned – 30 October 08
The New York Times paid a visit this week to a national biological defense lab that will “do research into some of the nastiest diseases on the planet, among them Ebola, anthrax, tularemia, West Nile virus, drug-resistant tuberculosis, bubonic plague, avian influenza and typhus.”
If that isn’t fascinating enough, the lab’s “gleaming new building” happens to be located in one of the most unstable landforms and where hurricanes regularly make a mess of things: Galveston, Texas.
Built atop concrete pylons driven 120 feet into the ground, the seven-floor laboratory was designed to stand up to 140-mile-an-hour winds. Its backup generators and high-security laboratories are 30 feet above sea level.
Says the lab’s deputy director, “The entire island can wash away and this is still going to be here.”
A gleaming biological bunker, as impenetrable and monolithic as CIA HQ, a Pandora Box protruding out in a landscape of ruins and shifting sands.
Perhaps the next lab will be on an oil rig?
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.