Maine senators work through scare Business as usual for staff of Snowe, Collins despite ricin discovery

WASHINGTON – Although all Senate buildings were closed Tuesday after the poison ricin was found in the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe tried to tend to business as usual.

“You have to make the best of a bad situation,” Collins said.

Both senators spent the day working out of their small “hideaway” offices in the Capitol. But while Collins kept in contact with a “skeleton crew” of staff working from their homes, Snowe’s staff crammed into the minuscule, sometimes malfunctioning temporary headquarters.

“Right now, the computer system is down, we’re functioning without Internet, we’re having problems printing,” Snowe spokeswoman Antonia Ferrier said over her cell phone. “We have limited access to the news – just a few hard copies of newspapers.”

But despite having to resort to taking down notes in longhand, Ferrier said the office was continuing to function.

“It’s a very serious situation, but we’re trying to make the best of it and work as hard as we can,” she said.

Several committee meetings that Collins had been scheduled to attend Tuesday, including a committee hearing she was to chair on postal reform and a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting featuring testimony from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, were canceled. However, she was able to reschedule meetings to take place Wednesday in House office buildings, which have remained open. The Senate itself has remained in session during the scare.

However, Collins said, the three Senate office buildings will remain closed Wednesday.

“I hope we can get back to business fully by the end of the week,” she said. “We can’t let the perpetrators of this crime disrupt the nation’s business.”

Both Collins and Ferrier said the scare reminded them of when then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., received letters in the fall of 2001 containing anthrax. No one was arrested.

“It’s really disconcerting for a person who was around during anthrax two years ago,” Ferrier said. “Hopefully we’ll get quick answers. It hits you on a personal level – these are your colleagues, you work with them.”

“It feels like deja vu,” Collins agreed. “But we’ve learned a lot of lessons from the anthrax experience. What makes this case more disconcerting is that there’s no treatment for ricin. But I think the Capitol police responded very quickly and we have a much better sense of the problem.”

Collins said one of her greatest concerns was the effect the scare would have on replies to constituent mail. Police have impounded senators’ mail, which already had to go through a lengthy decontamination process to reach congressional offices. The panic over anthrax led to the current mail screening system, which uses irradiation on all mail to the White House, congressional and other federal offices and takes several weeks to deliver letters.

Collins encouraged constituents to call her regional offices and to resend recent mail, but she said she was worried that now the process would take even longer. The irradiation screenings do not affect ricin.

“The mail process is already so fraught with delay,” Collins said. “I’m hesitant to see further restrictions imposed, but I don’t know enough to draw conclusions.”

For now, though, the Senate staffers are more concerned with accomplishing as much as they can while packed into “tiny, windowless rooms,” as Collins referred to them.

“We’re working under the assumption that the show must go on,” Ferrier said.