CIO —
Between September 18 and October 9, 2001, a series of letters were deposited at a mailbox in New Jersey. Poison-pen letters in a very literal sense, the envelopes contained a fine powder of deadly anthrax spores along with a short handwritten anti-American missive. Addressed to a variety of U.S. government offices and American media companies, the lethal letters created a scare, killed five people, and infected 19 others.
As these letters made their way to their fateful destinations, they left behind a deadly residue. Sent to addresses in New York, Washington, D.C., and Florida, the letters entered the United States Postal Service’s (USPS) massive network. The fine anthrax dust leaked from the envelopes to contaminate the Brentwood Processing and Distribution Center in Washington D.C., the Trenton Processing and Distribution Center in New Jersey, and a host of minor mail handling facilities in New Jersey, New York, Washington, and Florida. The Brentwood facility is an imposing 633,000 square-foot brick building. Inside, 2,500 workers work 24 hours a day, seven days a week to handle much of the torrential flow of letters coming to and from the nation’s capital. Some three and a half million items pass through Brentwood every day.
On October 21, 2001, two workers at the Brentwood facility were hospitalized with suspected (later confirmed) cases of anthrax. The USPS immediately shut down the facility for a thorough inspection. To their horror, they found anthrax spores on the mail-sorting equipment. The two sickened postal workers died the following day. It took two years to decontaminate and refit the cavernous facility.
In the meantime, the government’s mail had to get through; the USPS had to find an alternative to Brentwood’s lost capacity. "Neither sleet nor rain nor anthrax will keep these carriers from their appointed rounds," promised Sue Brennan, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Postal Service. The USPS quickly rerouted Brentwood bound flows to two other distribution centers in Capitol Heights and Gaithersburg in Maryland. By most accounts, mail delivery the day after the closure was normal.
The USPS survived the closure of the 633,000 square-foot Brentwood facility, the 300,000 square-foot Trenton facility, and other smaller facilities because of the massive overcapacity built into its system. Such redundant capacity was not the result of planning for disaster. Instead, it was the consequence of the reduction in the volume of mail resulting from the increasing use of the Internet to pay bills, write letters, and send greeting cards. Since USPS workers are subject to civil-service employment laws, the USPS cannot adjust its operations quickly for the falling business volume, resulting in massive overcapacity.
