‘Secret Government Warehouse’ Stockpiled with Chemical Weapon Counter-Measures

The government has gotten too big, too powerful, and too corrupt. That’s the mantra of many Americans, but they may not be aware that their inept government holds the power to save their life, but with no concrete plan to make it happen.

When Greg Burel tells people he’s in charge of some secret government warehouses, he often gets asked if they’re like the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark of the Covenant gets packed away in a crate and hidden forever.

“Well, no, not really,” says Burel, director of a program called the Strategic National Stockpile at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Thousands of lives might someday depend on this stockpile, which holds all kinds of medical supplies that the officials would need in the wake of a terrorist attack with a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon.

The location of these warehouses is secret. How many there are is secret. (Although a former government official recently said at a public meeting that there are six.) And exactly what’s in them is secret.

“If everybody knows exactly what we have, then you know exactly what you can do to us that we can’t fix,” says Burel. “And we just don’t want that to happen.”

What he will reveal is how much the stockpile is worth: “We currently value the inventory at a little over $7 billion.”

But some public health specialists worry about how all this would actually be deployed in an emergency.

“The warehouse is fine in terms of the management of stuff in there. What gets in the warehouse and where does it go after the warehouse, and how fast does it go to people, is where we have questions,” says Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.

Leave it to the government to do half a job — to acquire billions of dollars in life-saving materials — only to figure out how it would be distributed in a time of need.

Source: NPR