Hart Sick
Why the largest Senate office building remains closed.

December 20, 2001 8:30 a.m.

-328B is a small, windowless room, one of dozens that line the winding halls deep inside the Capitol. The hideaway of Arizona Republican senator Jon Kyl, it's no-frills by congressional standards — one desk, one table, and no portraits of long-dead senators. Most of the time it's fairly quiet, but these days S-328B is practically buzzing. There are sometimes as many as ten Kyl staffers squeezed into the 8-by-18 space, talking on cell phones, taking notes, or waiting a turn at the room's two computers. People reach over each other to get things done, they talk over each other to be heard, and on top of it all they worry about kicking over the coffee maker, which sits on a flattened FedEx box on the floor.

The room is so busy because Kyl and his staff have been locked out of their regular workplace in the Hart Senate Office Building since mid October, when an anthrax-loaded letter arrived in the office of Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. The letter set off a near panic on Capitol Hill, with hundreds of staffers lining up for doses of the antibiotic Cipro and officials setting off on disorganized searches for anthrax in other congressional office buildings.

In Hart, the presence of anthrax was confined mostly to the area in and around Daschle's fifth-floor office. But on October 17, Senate officials decided to close the entire building, and Kyl and his staff have been homeless ever since. (They have plenty of company: Hart, the largest Senate office building, houses 50 senators.)

The Senate leadership called in the Environmental Protection Agency to handle the cleanup, and at first it seemed that the job would be done in a matter of days. Then the original plan was thrown out, and EPA officials began considering more elaborate ways to decontaminate the building. Weeks passed. At the beginning of December, after much studying, moon-suited technicians pumped chlorine-dioxide gas into sealed-off portions of Hart. The chemicals killed most, but not all, of the anthrax inside. Two weeks later, the EPA tried again, but ran into technical problems and was unable to finish the job. In addition, workers set out nearly 3,000 chemical test strips to check for the presence of anthrax in various locations. Those are still being evaluated.

Throughout the work, the EPA has given senators regular briefings about the situation. It also sends out daily e-mail progress reports. But so far, agency officials have been unable to answer the one question that everyone asks: When will Hart be declared safe to reopen?

"I'm enormously frustrated," says Jon Kyl. "The Senate leadership is in a bind because the EPA will not declare it safe." The problem, Kyl and some other senators believe, is that the EPA's intention is not just to make the building safe for habitation but also to attain the possibly unattainable goal of killing every spore of anthrax inside Hart. If the EPA sticks to a "single spore" standard, some senators worry, the building might remain closed indefinitely. "They've got a zero-tolerance policy, which is an unreasonable standard," Kyl says.

It's all the more frustrating because the EPA concedes that all but "trace amounts" of anthrax have been removed from the building. Would such tiny quantities of the bacteria make anyone sick? At the beginning of the anthrax scare, scientists relied on old studies suggesting it would take 8,000 to 10,000 spores to infect someone with inhalation anthrax. Now they think the correct number might be lower, but most experts still believe infection would require far more anthrax than currently exists inside the Hart building. Even one of the EPA's own e-mail updates, noting that no Senate worker has shown any symptoms of anthrax, states, "Medical and public health professionals emphasize that positive environmental tests showing trace amounts of anthrax pose no risk to public health."

All of this leads some displaced and disgruntled Hart residents to suggest that the EPA is out of control, forcing the Senate to meet an unrealistic standard of environmental perfection. It's not terribly different, those critics suggest, from some of the regulations, like new arsenic-in-water limits, that the agency imposes on communities and businesses across the country — only now, Washington lawmakers are getting a first-hand look at the process. "If this is the way they function with the U.S. Senate, what would happen to the average town or community that doesn't have senators?" asks one unhappy aide.

While that's an argument that appeals to a number of conservative Republicans, it doesn't play particularly well at the EPA. "We don't have unrealistic standards," an agency spokeswoman says. "We have protocols to follow. Our goal is to kill all the spores . . . and we don't have a timetable while there's an ongoing cleanup."

But do things have to be that way? Compare the situation at Hart to another institution targeted by an anthrax attack. At about the same time the Daschle letter arrived at Hart, NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw received an anthrax-laden letter of his own, apparently from the same source. Although the Brokaw letter was thought to be just as dangerous as the one sent to Daschle, the area of NBC's Rockefeller Center headquarters that was affected is now open for business — and has been for weeks.

Shortly after the Brokaw letter was discovered, NBC News closed one floor of its headquarters. According to spokeswoman Allison Gollust, that floor reopened within about ten days, while the most affected area, less than one-half of one floor, remained closed for about a month. "It was an excess of caution on our part," says Gollust. "We did a thorough cleaning of those areas. Furniture, carpets were ripped out and hauled to a landfill. Once everything was gone, there wasn't very much left to clean." By the time a month had passed, NBC had cleared the area out, finished a careful decontamination operation, reconstructed the offices, and refurnished the whole place.

But in Washington, the Hart building remains closed — and the work of the Senate is seriously disrupted. While critics complain about the EPA, they acknowledge that the underlying problem rests with the Senate leadership. Some people close to minority leader Trent Lott accuse Daschle of not taking decisive action to reopen Hart, but other Republicans put the blame on Daschle and Lott (who both have spacious, well-appointed offices inside the Capitol). Whatever the case, it seems likely that at some point, if the building remains closed, the leadership will have to . . . lead. The Senate does, after all, control the Hart Senate Office Building, and the Senate has the authority to order the EPA to finish the work and hand over the building.

But so far, 100 senators have chosen to give the EPA the run of the place, and the latest word is that Hart won't open before at least January. There are daily rumors that it might remain closed until March, or maybe even later, as agency scientists chase that elusive last spore of anthrax. "We have turned over control to a group of people who cannot conceivably have the same balancing of interests that a senator has," says Jon Kyl. "There needs to be a balance here."