Update: Anthrax, Irradiation and your Plant Orders
Gardeners concerned about their plant and seed orders arriving dead by irradiation can begin to relax. It seems like the whole frightening business is coming to a halt. The interests representing the mail order plant and seed businesses, not to mention the credit card companies and others whose product would be damaged by irradiation stated their cases and the USPO listened. Post Office representatives began to reconsider their original statements - that all mail would be irradiated. They discovered that it took one full minute to effectively irradiate a piece of mail - and at that rate we'd be into the next year, at least, before a single week's mail was scanned. This was not only inefficient but cost-prohibitive.
And - as one facility discovered, the irradiation could prove to be as dangerous as the problems it was designed to prevent. According to Salon Magazine two batches of mail overheated during the process and caught fire. Over 90 pounds of mail - small envelopes and magazines, were destroyed in the two blazes.
Salon quotes John Gilbert, spokesman for Ion Beam Applications, where the irradiation was being carried out, as saying "Our engineers believe both incidents are linked to material present in the mail which cause overheating during radiation exposure."
The Ion Plant was irradiating mail from the now closed down Brentwood postal facility, where two workers died from inhalation anthrax at the beginning of the scare. They also are irradiating mail from the Hamilton Post Office which also had processed at least four contaminated letters. The mail being processed is only that which would normally be handled through those post offices.
Some post office officials were apparently telling people that the irradiation had not yet begun - something this story contradicts. But nevertheless most of our mail is not in danger - unless its normal route from sender to received happens to be through Brentwood or Hamilton.
It is the Postal Service which is suffering. The fire incident now adds to theburden it already bears, as it must now find a way to screen out mail that contains flammable materials, making the use of irradiation even less likely to be the solution they had once hoped it would be - and making its eventual use on all mail extremely unlikely.
Meanwhile, USPO officials are assuring concerned companies that only small envelopes mailed from "blue boxes" - that familiar corner mailbox - are of concern to them, since all of the anthrax contaminated mail found so far has originated from that source.
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