Testing Atlanta bomb for chemical, biological warfare
agents
Shortly after a bomb exploded near a light and sound tower in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park this July, Federal Bureau of Investigation special agents collected four samples and carried them to an off-site laboratory for analysis for chemical and biological warfare agents. The laboratory, called the Science & technology (SciTech) Center, was housed in a building on the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention's Chamblee campus, just north of downtown Atlanta.
The samples consisted of soil from the bomb crater, soil from a site slightly removed from the crater, bits of shrapnel, and several pieces of textile from the bag in which the bomb was carried. They were placed in sterile containers, which were slipped into plastic bags and sealed for transport.
Scientists at the SciTEch Center decided to screen the most porous sample - soil - for chemical warfare agents, and lal of the samples, including soil, for biological warfare agents. There was little concern that chemical agents were present because none of the injured showed signs of chemical poisoning. Biological agents, however, act much more slowly. So, until the analyses were complete, the scientists were not certain that the bomb wasn't contaminated with anthrax, botulinum, or some other biological warfare agent.
The Army Materiel Command Treaty Lab, headed by Dennis J. Reutter, sampled the headspace over the soil sample for volatile chemical warfare agents using a gas chromatograph with a flame photometric detector. No chemical agents were detected.
Had there been the need, Reutter's group of four, including two chemists, could have tested the soil in a variety of ways other than the one chosen. The group's self-contained mobile lab is equipped to monitor and detect any of the chemicals listed in the Chemical Weapons Convention. In addition to the equipment used to test the soil sample, the lab also includes a portable gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer, a portable Fourier-transform infrared spectrophotometer, and equipment to conduct enzymatic analyses.
"The equipment is common but the lab's portability is uncommon," boasts Reutter. "It is packaged to be highly mobile and to be deployed rapidly on-site anywhere." In fact, Reutter received official orders only two days before his lab deployed to Atlanta.
The totally self-sufficient and mobile biological warfare agent identification lab was directed by Cmdr. James P. Burans, head of the Biological Defense Research Program in the Naval Medical Research Institute. Burans' group of two was able to carry out a suite of handheld immunological screening assays as well as the standard enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and nucleic-acid-based (polymerase chain reaction) detection assays, plus microbiological culture techniques - all able to detect biological warfare agents of concern. None was detected in the samples tested.
Burans says the Olympic experience demonstrated that "various federal organizations are becoming very adept at working together...to support a counterterrorism exercise."
But Reutter cautions, "If we are going to do this regularly, it has to become more formalized to become more effective."
