February 08, 2006

Nerve Gas Scare in Senate Building

I pity some Senate workers. A nerve gas scare kept 200 people working at the Russell Senate Office building tucked away in a parking garage Wednesday. They included Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT), Chuck Hagel (R-NE), and Jeff Sessions (R-AL). The quarantine method appears to have worked. Since it was a nerve gas scare it's not as important. If there really were nerve gas in the building people would have gotten sick and maybe dropped dead. Now, if it was a biological attack then the quarantine would (hopefully) keep victims from passing on the bio-agent.

The scare came from a false positive from a sensor in the Russell building's attic:

Sen. Bill Frist, Senate Majority Leader, said: "It was a false positive. That means an alarm went off, with an indication it was initially positive but with further testing there was no agent of danger found."

[Sgt. Kimberly] Schneider said substances as benign as fertilizer could trigger a false positive result for chemical agents.

"Security Scare Forces US Capitol Evacuation"