Issue Date: 3/22/2007, Posted On: 3/21/2007

Smoke at BUMC shuts down Albany Street
SOUTH END NEWS
Linda Rodriguez
lrodriguez@southendnews.com

Smoke likely caused by a malfunctioning autoclave and discovered outside a ninth floor laboratory at Boston University Medical Center’s Center for Advanced Biomedical Research in BioSquare prompted the evacuation of the building Tuesday. At least eight fire engines and multiple hazardous materials and special units responded to the incident, shutting down Albany Street between East Brookline and East Concord streets for several hours.

Firefighters responded to a call at 11:40 a.m. for smoke in a vestibule outside a series of four labs on the ninth floor of the building, according to Steve McDonald of the Boston Fire Department. While there was no actual fire, firefighters responded with a “level three hazmat response,” given the presence of potentially dangerous materials in the lab; McDonald refused to comment on what the labs contained, but did say the firefighters were aware of both what was being studied and where it was located in the lab. A level three response, he said, is the highest level of response to hazardous materials and indicates that firefighters should be wearing “fully encapsulated suits.”

“That’s a standard procedure,” he said, however, noting that a level three response is not uncommon. “What happened in this particular incident, because there was no life hazard, no one incapacitated in the lab and no immediate threat to anyone’s safety, we’ll do a very slow and deliberate entry.”

McDonald said that the floor was evacuated immediately, and that the entire 10-story building was evacuated within an hour after firefighters arrived, because the Fire Department had taken control of and shut down elevators in the building. The building houses 387 employees on any given day, and “they all of the sudden didn’t have any elevator service,” he explained.

The fire department, as a matter of procedure, also shut down the electricity to the lab, whereupon, McDonald said, the smoke stopped. Ellen Berlin, spokesperson for BUMC, said via email that the smoke has been attributed to a malfunctioning autoclave, a container that can sustain high temperatures for the purposes of sterilization.

The building reopened at 5 a.m., Berlin said, after the Environmental Health Office of the Boston Public Health Commission “surveyed the lab and gave its approval for the reopening” Tuesday night.

Tom Lyons, a spokesman for the BPHC, said that a BPHC team determined there was no indication of any “infectious threat” to the lab, building or community. Out of an “abundance of caution,” said Lyons, the environmental health team also took “surface swiping” environmental samples from the lab, and the BPHC will have test results from these samples in the next couple of days. Additionally, BUMC has agreed not to continue research in that laboratory until the BPHC says it’s safe to do so, said Lyons.

The scene outside the building at 700 Albany St., was relatively calm in the time after the building was evacuated. Said one employee of BUMC standing on the sidewalk opposite the building and referring to the potentially hazardous materials in use at laboratories, “They usually react like this, since it’s a lab.”

McDonald confirmed that the number of vehicles responding and the strength of the hazmat response was “standard procedure” for the Fire Department.

The ninth floor of the building houses five labs; the lab that saw the smoke was studying tularemia. On Tuesday, Gina DiGravio, another spokesperson from BUMC, said that the lab was the same one that had seen a tularemia exposure in 2004; on Wednesday, Berlin said that it was not the same lab.

Tularemia, also known as rabbit fever, is a potentially lethal bacterial disease not easily spread via human contact. Three BU researchers were exposed to the bacteria, though BU did not release the news until months after it was confirmed that tularemia had sickened the researchers; the breach of lab protocol made headlines as it came amid fierce public debate over the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory, better known as the BioLab, which is currently being built on

Albany Street, just one building away from 700 Albany St. That building is slated to house a biosafety level four lab, which will study some of the most dangerous pathogens known to science, in addition to housing levels two and three labs. Though the building is currently being built, the BioLab is currently also embroiled in various legal battles conducted by individuals seeking to halt the construction of the level four labs.

DiGravio said that there was no concern that the incident would put the public at risk for infection by agents being studied at any of the labs in the building. McDonald also said that during the emergency, firefighters in hazmat suits first checked the containers holding the hazardous materials and found them to be intact. Though the incident proved to be minor, community members opposed to the building of the BioLab are still concerned.

“This is another example of how things go wrong in laboratories. Maybe this time the biological agents were locked in a freezer, but maybe next time they’ll be out in the lab, being experimented with when people needed to evacuate,” said Gene Benson, legal counsel for Alternatives for Community and Environment, a Roxbury-based environmental justice advocacy group.

Chris Orchard contributed to this report, a different version of which was published on SouthEndNews.com March 20.