In the wake of Sept. 11, federal officials said the United States needed a new, state-of-the-art facility to defend against bioterrorism and stop diseases that could devastate the countrys farm economy and threaten human lives. They chose Manhattan, Kansas, as the site of the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility. The plan was to have it up and running last year. But that date has fallen ever deeper into the future. At best, itll open in 2022, at a price that surpasses the original budget by $800 million. This is third and final article in a three-part series looking at the matter. Click here for part 1, and here for part 2.
III: The Community
Drivers sometimes slow down to gawk at the massive biocontainment lab rising up at Denison and Kimball streets in Manhattan. The towering cranes and battalion of trucks cut an impressive silhouette on the hill. Its safe to say many in this college community of 53,000 are excited by NBAFs promise of prestige and jobs, an estimated 2,600-plus in the labs first 25 years.
But looming in others minds is fear that one of the contagious or deadly pathogens could escape say on a football Saturday in the fall, when tens of thousands of people pack nearby Bill Snyder Family Stadium. Even after all of these years of planning and construction, critics say that health officials, law enforcement and government officials arent as prepared as they should be.
For example, once NBAF opens, only one infectious disease doctor will visit Manhattans Ascension Via Christie hospital once a week from Wichita, about two and a half hours away. Ascension Via Christie is the citys main hospital, and has just 12 isolation rooms to hold patients who are exposed to an infectious disease.
The rooms, outfitted with specialized air filters to protect pathogenic microbes from escaping, are for anybody with a contaminant that is airborne, said Carolyn Koehn, the hospitals regional director of safety and emergency response. Right now, our primary use would be if we had a patient come in with tuberculosis.
And NBAF researchers will study far more exotic and toxic diseases than TB.
Carrying a 4-inch-thick binder of emergency response strategies, Koehn said she isnt worried. Long before Kansas was awarded NBAF, the hospital had been rehearsing coordinated exercises with local and state emergency responders.
I have a lot of confidence in our emergency operations plan, she said. If were able to respond well to an infectious disease outbreak, wed be able to respond very well to something at NBAF.
An escaped virus wont just be the hospitals problem. Another of the first responders is likely to be the Riley County Police Department.
Chief Dennis P. Butler said his department has the highest emergency response certification of any law enforcement agency in the state, as well as having a detective on staff who is a liaison to Homeland Security and a member of the FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Butler said hes been thoroughly briefed on NBAF, and after an exhaustive tour that he cant talk much about due to security restrictions, hes confident that the facility is secure.
I have never seen anything like it, he said. The closest thing I can (compare) this facility to was when I took a tour of a nuclear power plant.
Just behind NBAF, theres a wheat-colored building that houses the Kansas Department of Agriculture. Thats intentional: As part of the preparation for NBAF, Brownback moved the agency from the capital city of Topeka to Manhattan.
