The first look inside Plum Island's Lab 257.

Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory By Michael Christopher Carroll William Morrow, 289 pages, $24.95 Before the attacks in 2001, few civilians had any idea that something hinky was happening out on Plum Island, an 840-acre patch of land two miles off the eastern tip of Long Island. Those who knew anything at all tended to be crackpots and found ways to worm Plum Island into any number of L.I.-based conspiracy theories. It became, in a way, the East Coast's Area 51: a super high-security top-secret government lab under the jurisdiction of the USDA where scientists studied virulent animal diseases. The big question among the paranoids was whether or not that was all they did out there. And if it really was no big deal, then why didn't Plum Island appear on most maps?

Since the attacks, we've been hearing more about Plum Island?and little of it has been good. There were security concerns. The fire departments on shore were unprepared to deal with an emergency out there. Maintenance workers went on strike. And then last year the facility was quietly turned over to Homeland Security, though no one could say why.

The Plum Island administration still claimed that all they were doing there was researching ways to stop foot-and-mouth disease and African swine fever. We were told that their only concern was in protecting American livestock, but fewer and fewer people believed that. It was an Army biowarfare lab before the USDA took over in 1954, and most of the facility's directors over the years had backgrounds in military biowarfare research. More people were getting antsy about having a major germ lab (whatever its true purpose) so close to home. Chemical or radiation leaks are one thing, but if you release a germ into the environment, it can keep spreading. Recent news stories hinting that the place is a mess aren't making anyone more comfortable.

So far as I'm aware, Michael Carroll's Lab 257 is the first book to focus specifically on what goes on at the mysterious 50-year-old facility. (Novelist Nelson DeMille wrote a thriller centered on Plum Island a few years back, but that doesn't really count.) And if Carroll's writing is at times a bit overwrought (he's a lawyer; it's his first book and he's clearly trying hard), the book remains a treasure trove of unnerving information. To hear him tell it, the lab didn't just become a mess in recent years?it's always been a mess.

In his preface, along with discussing the genesis of the book, Carroll hints at a potential al Qaeda plot to attack the lab. The results of such an attack would be disastrous, of course, but I have to wonder how necessary it is to bring such a thing up. The facts as they stand, the lab's less-than-stellar safety record and evidence of the things that have escaped from there already are scary enough without resorting to the terrorist bugaboo. The problems on Plum Island are all homegrown, and very, very real.

The proof is in Lab 257's first chapter, in which Carroll argues quite convincingly that outbreaks of both Lyme disease and West Nile virus originated at the lab after the experimental viruses were accidentally released into the environment.

Even more disturbing is his account of what happened out there when Hurricane Bob hit in 1991.

There are a number of buildings on the island?labs, administration offices and the like. Lab 257 is where the work on the most virulent diseases takes place. When it was constructed, it was outfitted with a number of safety features?air locks, sewage treatment systems (they keep herds of infected animals on the premises), deep refrigeration units, air filters, decontamination methods of all sorts. The maintenance crew had been asking for a few more things, like an electric generator in case of emergencies, but the administration didn't feel they were necessary at the time.

But when Bob tore through the island, everything failed. The electricity went out. Then the back-up electricity went out. And without electricity, nothing in the lab works. Specimens kept at sub-zero temperatures began to thaw as refrigerators shut down. The seals around the doors of the air locks deflated. The pumps in the sewage treatment tanks stopped and the tanks overflowed. It was a complete systemic breakdown. While it seems nothing (miraculously enough) was released into the environment, it was a pretty hairy series of events?which would later be denied by the lab's administration and the USDA.

In the years following the hurricane, the administration on Plum Island has been replaced a number of times. Yet despite occasional promises of change, they've continued to remain as tightlipped as ever about what really goes on there?even to the point of refusing to assist mainland doctors who were trying to diagnose former Plum Island employees who'd come down with mysterious illnesses. With Homeland Security in charge, that's likely to get worse.

Carroll was lucky enough to get in touch with a number of ex-employees (disgruntled or not) who were willing to go on the record about what sorts of things have happened there?not only during the storm, but in day-to-day operations as well. All in all, it's a very disturbing account. And while, yes, Carroll certainly approaches the book with an agenda in mind, the facts are still there beneath his editorializing and the heavy-handed prose. In opening up the (almost) hermetically sealed Lab 257 and taking a peek inside, Carroll's done an invaluable bit of investigative research.