Talk:Gruinard Island

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[edit] Operation Dark Harvest

If anyone can find refs to it, it would be interesting to include "Operation Dark Harvest", where the SNLA claimed it had taken anthrax off the island, and was going to use it in biological attacks.--MacRusgail (talk) 17:54, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

I've found a Time Magazine article on it. Lurker (said · done) 11:59, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

The area of the island is 520 acres but only about 16 acres were actually decontaminated; this was in the vicinity of where the anthrax air bomb was detonated. The actual method of application of the formaldehyde was applied using a complex matrix of irrigation pipes; the seawater was pumped up using Coventry Climax fire pumps and mixed with the formaldehyde using modified fertiliser injectors from greenhouse hydroponics set ups. As to Dark Harvest it sounds like a typical conspiracy theory; there would be a lot easier ways of obtaining anthrax spores than trying to cultivate them from spores obtained from the island. Certainly by the time the decontamination was carried out the spore level was very low, and within another dozen years they would have been virtually undetectable.