Galveston Biolab Stands Up to Hurricane Ike

When the National Institutes of Health funded two new biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratories in 2003 to study the most life-threatening infectious diseases, concern was immediately voiced about the location of one of the labs. It wasn’t Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL). At the time, worry centered on the Galveston National Laboratory (GNL), to be built at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston. The Texas coast is hurricane territory, and some feared it would be impossible to ensure the security of the lab against the winds and floods a big storm would bring.

Thanks to Hurricane Ike, officials at UTMB are confident those fears have been laid to rest. Although Galveston Island took a devastating hit when Ike blew in on September 13, the GNL weathered the storm precisely as it was designed to do, suffering no structural damage and only minor water seepage around the ground-floor doors. Despite significant damage to other buildings on the UTMB campus, none of the high-security laboratories, in the GNL or in other buildings, suffered any biocontainment breaches. The GNL remains on track for its formal dedication ceremony on November 11, 2008.

Joan Nichols, associate director of research at UTMB, who oversees all campus biocontainment labs, says the positive outcome was no stroke of luck, but the result of wise engineering and a comprehensive emergency plan that includes a long-term weather-tracking strategy.

Ike’s lesson for Galveston, Boston, and the six other North American cities that house BSL-4 labs, she says, is that “preparedness is attainable, and it works.”

The University of Texas Medical Branch begins monitoring weather events well before they threaten the Texas coast, Nichols says. “We start tracking tropical depressions as they form off Cape Verde and the coast of Africa,” and even before there’s a firm threat to the United States, “we’re already looking at what’s going on in the labs,” she says, with an eye toward shutting down if necessary. As a storm passes Cuba, BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities “initiate a phased slowdown process. We look at experiments we have ongoing, at what animal experiments we have ongoing, at what pathogens we have in use. We evaluate what we cannot start that week, look toward how we’re going to terminate, if we have to do that, and how we can prepare in terms of getting things that we’re not using into storage.”

A specially designated biocontainment team works with UTMB’s department of health and safety in making decisions at each stage in the process. The team can start implementing a slowdown well before the university concludes that a storm is coming, Nichols says, providing a crucial head start.

When Ike formed, the biocontainment team had already been in slowdown mode, responding to a possible threat from Hurricane Gustav. That didn’t materialize, but Ike followed soon behind, and on September 10 it became clear that the storm would pose a threat.

“We went into full emergency mode on the 10th and the 11th and began a full shutdown,” Nichols says. That involved terminating all experiments, decontaminating, removing all pathogens, and getting all tissue into storage. “So by September 12, the day before the storm, the last-minute things we were doing were moving freezers to higher ground, making sure we were well above flood planning, which brings us up above the second floor, and just doing everything we could before we lost our elevators.”

In the end, Nichols says, “We had enough time, and had planned so well, that those last two days were not panicked. They were about consolidating our animals as much as possible, getting the university itself ready with its facilities plan to fall back to essential areas that would have emergency power and emergency chilling through the storm. All of this was taken care of well before landfall. So the Friday before the storm was actually kind of quiet.”

“You hate to have to be tested like this, but we passed,” says Alisha Prather, director of communications at UTMB. “We were able to test the new building in a hands-on experience. There was no active research and no agents in the building at the time, and so you’re left with the ability to truly test your mechanics. And it went really well.”

Nichols calls Ike a once-in-a-lifetime storm. Although it measured somewhere between category two and three in wind strength, she says, “it was a category four surge-wise. I don’t expect we’re going to see another one like that in my career. But if we do, we know the building will survive.”

“UTMB’s experience shows that emergency preparedness is vitally important in the operation of these kinds of laboratories,” says Mark Klempner, Conrad Wesselhoeft Professor of Medicine, Medical Campus associate provost for research, and the principal investigator for the NEIDL. “They executed their plans very well, and as a result the lab experienced minimal impact from the hurricane. There is much to learn from UTMB’s experiences.”

Construction on the NEIDL in Boston’s South End neighborhood is substantially complete, but research will not begin until a comprehensive environmental risk assessment is completed. A Blue Ribbon Panel of experts, appointed by the National Institutes of Health, has been meeting since March in response to a National Academy of Sciences concern that an earlier risk assessment conducted by the NIH did not adequately identify worst-case scenarios.

In February 2009, Boston University will conduct a simulated version of its own disaster, a series of training exercises involving police, fire, and other safety agencies. The simulation will help refine emergency preparedness and safety procedures, Klempner says. It will also be “an opportunity for the community to learn more about how biosafety in research labs is carried out and about the many safety protocols in place to protect our scientists and the community from harm.”

Click here for NEIDL safety information.

Bari Walsh can be reached at bawalsh@bu.edu.