Friday, June 12, 2009

Image of the Week: Plum Island

PLUM ISLAND
The image above depicts Plum Island, home to the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Plum Island's two labs, one of which was closed by 1995. While the official story is that this facility studies diseases which can affect livestock, such as foot-and-mouth disease, anti-livestock biological warfare programs were studied until 1969. A replacement facility for Plum Island was reported in 2008, and may be constructed in Manhattan, Kansas, as the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility. One can only wonder what Biological and Agricultural defense constitutes. It will be interesting to note if Plum Island remains active following the construction of the new facility.

ADDITIONAL DISCUSSION

Feel free to discuss the current Image of the Week at the IMINT & Analysis Forum Image of the Week discussion thread found here.

SOURCES

-Satellite imagery provided courtesy of Google Earth

Plum Island Animal Disease Laboratory

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Had some lamb, eh? ;-)

Anonymous said...

A closer inspection (500 m altitude) of Plum Island in Google Earth as of September 2009 would indicate that the entirety of the island's imagery has been digitally filtered so as to remove all high resolution details. What is being done there that requires this sort of security?