Hamilton lab agrees to environmental study

Expansion plans delayed at least a year.

Officials at Rocky Mountain Labs in Hamilton announced Friday they will conduct a more exhaustive environmental study before breaking ground on a new biological research lab that would house deadly pathogens.

By the IR State Bureau

The study, an environmental impact statement, is expected to delay construction of the lab at least a year, said Marshall Bloom, associate director for Rocky Mountain Labs.
The announcement won praise from locals who have complained Rocky Mountain Labs wasn’t answering their questions about the lab and its impacts.

Rocky Mountain Labs, an arm of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under the National Institutes of Health, announced in February plans to build a Biosafety Level Four laboratory at the 33-acre campus in Hamilton. Only a handful of other such labs exist in the United States. The labs are built to safely study deadly diseases like Ebola.

Rocky Mountain Labs has been conducting a less extensive environmental study of the proposed laboratory called an environmental assessment. Such studies are called for by the federal National Environmental Policy Act, a law that mandates environmental studies before embarking on many projects on federal lands.

The National Institutes of Health decided that, due to the complexity of the environmental impacts of such a lab, the lesser environmental study would probably end up suggesting the more extensive study, anyway, Bloom said.