Most of the executive agencies, from the Governor’s Office to the Department of Legal Affairs (also know as the Attorney General’s Office) are housed in the Executive Office Building, or EOB. It’s a one-stop shopping mall of government departments. By one-stop, I of course mean that you could potentially visit all departments at the same time, not that you could actually ever complete a task there in one visit.
On Thursday, we were working oh so hard in our office when this lady started running around saying there was a fire, and we needed to evacuate. We actually laughed at it, until she explained that the fire alarms didn’t work, and that we really had to go.
I grabbed my stuff and began leaving the office. A lot of people ignored the warnings and tried to finish their conversations or work before exiting. As I sauntered down the stairs (I’m on the third floor), I could see three firemen poking around the ceiling on the second floor. One of them wore a hazmat suit, but only the bottoms. The top was draped over his waist.
The bottom floor of the EOB doesn’t have doors going outside, rather they are just very large openings giving the building an atrium, or courtyard feel. The police ushered us outside to stand under an awning outside. As it was 2:00, most people just kept moving to their cars, and were gone. The parking lot emptied almost completely within the first 30 minutes.
We wandered off and got ice cream at a nearby gas station and came back to hang out in the shade. One guy left his cell phone in his office and asked a cop if he could get it. The conversation went something like this:
Guy: “Hey, I left some stuff in my office, and I’m flying off island this evening. Could I just run up and grab it. It won’t be two minutes.”
Cop: “Sorry sir, nobody is allowed upstairs.”
Guy: “It will only take a second. Besides, I don’t see any fire.”
Cop: “It is a chemical spill. It’s too dangerous to go up there.”
Guy: “A chemical spill? What kind of chemical spill?”
Cop: “Don’t worry sir. It’s just a drill.”
Guy: “Oh. If it’s a drill then I could go up safely.”
Cop: “No. There’s a chemical spill, but this is a drill.”
I’m not sure the cop understood what “drill” meant. Anyway, we learned later that it was an anthrax scare. Somebody in the governor’s office opened a letter and found white powder in it. It made us feel quite safe knowing that a potentially deadly poison was floating around the air while we stood in the entry way to a breezy building. It was also good knowing that the police stationed to protect us didn’t know what was going on. The EPA, the only people trained to handle this kind of stuff, weren’t notified. They found out by running into the fire department as they waited outside. The items potentially contaminated by this fatal disease were then put in Hefty bags and placed on the front lawn of the building, for later pick-up by a Hazmat team.
The next day, work went on as normal. We got a letter with letter head from Interpol and the Department of Justice, a headline from the Department of Homeland Security, and signed by the local FBI. It essentially said that most of the territories and embassies are getting these letters, but there is no anthrax in them.
No surprise there. American Samoa would not be the prime target to use rare and valuable anthrax. I’m actually surprised the people mailing the letters were aware we are a territory.
Here’s the link to a news story, complete with a picutre of trash bags on the front lawn.
Samoa News
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