Brush with terror: HHS Sec recalls trial by fire
An anthrax threat at the Winter Olympics
In an unusual personal aside at a strategic planning meeting, Michael Leavitt, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently recalled a harrowing night when it appeared for a few hours that a bioterrorism attack was underway at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
"Very few people heard about that event because it proved to be a false alarm," the former governor of Utah said at a recent bioterrorism preparedness workshop in Washington, DC. "But I learned a lot about the fear, and I learned a great deal that has helped to guide me as we've gone forward in preparation for bioterrorism."
On the third or fourth night of the Olympic Games — in the wake of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks that followed — Leavitt was at the figure skating competition when he got a call from his security officials, he recalled. An anthrax indicator monitor that had been placed in the C Concourse at the Salt Lake International Airport was reading positive.
"It was a dramatic moment, because I had been told that the same monitor had not only been tested once, it had been tested four times," he said. "It had tested positive all four times. But the more definitive test was at the lab. And I would not know for the next 2½ hours if it was anthrax or simply a false read."
Leavitt mulled the implications as he left the venue.
"With the traffic of the Olympics, there would be tens of thousands of people arriving on planes, changing planes, walking through the concourse and getting on other planes, and transitioning on to 90 or 100 additional cities, he said. "If the readings were true, not only would those in that airport be contaminated, but literally people traveling to over 100 different cities would have received a white, powdery substance. They would be in a potential race against death. It was a frightening moment in that respect."
Moreover, about two months earlier, security officials had done a sweep of the airport and found some 200 people who were there without proper documentation. "I could imagine a cell that had been put into place well in advance of the Olympic Games, knowing that it would be the focus of the world," Leavitt said. "I imagined one of these people getting active and slipping something into the ventilator system of the airport laced with anthrax, quietly, silently, without notice."
Hazmat teams were standing ready as Leavitt awaited confirmatory testing before closing the airport. "We concluded after consultation that, rather than close the airport, we should call in the hazmat teams and have them positioned and ready for action, knowing full well that if we had to close the airport, it would have changed the focus for 3.5 billion people from the humanitarian event of the Olympics to a terrorist event, whether it was true or not," he recalled. "Likewise, we had the possibility that if it were true, and we didn't close the airport, we would needlessly subject thousands of people — tens of thousands of people — in cities all over America to the substance."
Leavitt stood outside a laboratory as technicians did the definitive assays to determine if the monitor reading was accurate. "The best news call I had all those Olympics was the notification that it was a false read," he said. "But it was a live-fire exercise. And the fear of terrorism, and the possibility of bioterrorism, became quite evident to me."
In an unusual personal aside at a strategic planning meeting, Michael Leavitt, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently recalled a harrowing night when it appeared for a few hours that a bioterrorism attack was underway at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
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