Company sealed-off after anthrax alert

June 2002

A Wexford-based company was sealed off by the gardai and the fire service after an anthrax scare on Tuesday.

Gardai said an emergency alert was sparked after a powdery white substance fell from a letter which arrived in the post at Equifax in the Whitemill Industrial Estate.

‘ The letter was being opened by a member of staff, who discovered it contained a white powdery substance,’ said Sgt. Mick Walsh, from Wexford Garda Station.

He said the gardai called in the fire brigade and the Health Board.

Because of the swift action of staff at the company, the threat was confined to a ground floor reception area.

‘We cordoned off the offices with the assistance of the two fire brigade units and the health authority, who supplied a doctor. We then sealed the package and have since forwarded it to our forensics laboratory,’ he said.

Sgt. Walsh said the doctor at the scene had described the substance in the packet as ‘ low risk’, but he refused to write the incident off as a hoax.

‘We won’t know until we get the stuff analysed properly,’ he said.

The South Eastern Health Board said public health doctors were called to the scene, and praised the actions of the staff at Equifax, which employs 170 people in Wexford.

‘ The company dealt very well with the problem. No-one was contaminated,’ said a health board official.

The typed envelope containing the substance was posted in Leeds in Northern England. While gardai were reluctant to speculate on a possible motive, the company recently expanded its operations in Wexford after closing down its operations at Clydebank in Scotland, and some feel Wexford may have been targeted because of this.

The company was not responding to media inquiries on Tuesday.

‘We’re not talking to anybody from the press at the moment,’ was the response when an attempt was made to contact the company.