Ricin Forces Senators to Improvise

Authorities on Wednesday continued their search for the origin of the ricin that forced the closure of all three Senate office buildings, as the Senate majority leader -- in whose mailroom the toxic white powder was found -- announced that the buildings would reopen beginning today.

Because no one had reported any symptoms of ricin poisoning, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) told a news conference, the Russell Senate Office Building would reopen at noon today, followed by the Hart building on Friday. The Dirksen building, where the ricin was found and which Frist called “the crime scene,” was scheduled to reopen Monday, he said.

The investigation is ongoing, said Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer. “There’s been no ‘smoking letter’ information that helps tie this thing together,” he said.

Senate staff members have been working in hallways, in their employers’ private Capitol hideaways and from home since the discovery Monday of the toxin near a mail-sorting machine in Frist’s office.

“Of course, it has been a tremendous disruption,” Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said of the ricin discovery and the subsequent investigation.

After anthrax-laced mail sent to two senators in late 2001 forced a months-long closure of the Hart building, Boxer ordered her staff to make contingency plans. So, when the three Senate office buildings were closed this week, staffers piled into the senator’s one-room hideaway office in the Capitol, where they had installed phone lines, a fax machine and a copier. They plugged in half a dozen laptops and went to work.

But soon, they realized that the battery chargers for their BlackBerries and cellphones were in the now-off-limits office building. By Wednesday afternoon, Boxer still was unable to persuade the Capitol Police to let her chief of staff inside the Hart building to retrieve them. Several staff members had to share scarce telephone lines.

Senate business was significantly disrupted, particularly work on a $318-billion highway bill. Debate began on that legislation Tuesday.

So many staff members involved with the highway bill were forced to work out of the hideaways Tuesday and Wednesday that they began calling it the “hideaway bill.”

The staff of Sen. James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.), the ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee, felt particularly oppressed. Several were trapped for hours Monday night because Jeffords’ and the committee’s offices are on the fourth floor of the Dirksen building, near Frist’s mailroom. They underwent decontamination procedures before being allowed to go home early Tuesday.

And when Jeffords’ staffers came back to work that day and debate began on the highway bill, they found themselves crammed into the senator’s hideaway, sharing one computer and two phones.

“This is the committee’s big legislative kahuna for the year, and this has made it really difficult,” said one staff member, who asked not to be identified. The carefully marked-up versions of the bill, the product of months of work, were out of reach in the Dirksen building.

“Nobody has paper,” said Sherry Kiaman, Jeffords’ legislative director. “At least the playing field is level, because nobody has their paper.”

Staffers not involved with the bill were told to stay home because there was no place for them to work. But more than a dozen still needed to be on Capitol Hill, cycling through Jeffords’ hideaway to deal with the legislation.

By Wednesday, stacks of proposed amendments were piling up in the hallway outside the hideaway. Staffers’ coats lay draped over a banister. With the Senate office-supply store quarantined, an aide was dispatched to a shop to buy pens, notebooks, paper clips and other supplies.

Looking unflappable as his staffers swirled around him, Jeffords said their experience with the anthrax scare meant that this time, there was “no panic.”

Boxer was less sanguine, although she said the Senate has come a long way since someone mailed letters with anthrax spores inside them to Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) just over two years ago.

“When anthrax happened, we just had one phone line, we couldn’t access e-mails, we couldn’t access computer files -- all of our lives were in those offices,” Boxer recalled. “I told my staff that we must all carry cellphones all the time and told them to make sure we would be able to work if it happened again.”

By Tuesday, Boxer said, her staff was rotating through her hideaway, tucked behind the radio and television studio on the Capitol’s third floor.

Will Hart, press secretary for Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said Capitol Police did let some of Inhofe’s staffers into their offices Wednesday, just long enough to download hard drives and pick up documents for debate on the highway bill.

Although Inhofe has a staff of 25, only 11 came to work Wednesday, squeezing into the senator’s Capitol hideaway, Hart said. Technicians were hooking up extra computers and phones so they could stay on top of the highway bill debate, Hart said.

“This is the largest bill of the year for us, and yesterday was kind of a lost day,” Hart said. But with staffers meeting in hideaways, halls and cloakrooms, he said, the debate was moving briskly. “Our staff is at half strength, but working at full strength,” he said.