If you are in Galveston, or in the surrounding areas, please get yourself, your friends and family, and your pets out now, or get ready to leave very soon if Rita doesn't change her ways. This is the lesson from Katrina. There is one thing different here: your town has a BSL4 facility in it.
In the interest if full disclosure, I should start off mentioning that I support this kind of research, and fully believe in the necessity of maintaining the ability to study the world's most dangerous pathogens. I probably wouldn't have chosen Galveston as the place to put one of these facilities, though.
Please read on...
Biosafety Level 4, or BSL4 for short, is the designation given to the
security measures needed to house the world's deadliest organisms. By
definition, BSL4 pathogens have no vaccines or treatments, much less cures
- they are nature's own death sentence. According to federal guidelines,
they pose a "high risk of exposure and infection to personnel, the
community and the environment." Only six BSL4 facilities currently exist in
North America.
The core facility in Galveston is here:
http://www.rcebiodefense.org/rce_pub/rce6/core_bsl4.htm
It is my sincere hope that everything was transferred over to their other facility in San Antonio, or else sterilized. I have no doubt that, given Galveston's location and history, plans for a major hurricane are in place, and are being activated right now.
But if I lived there, I'd get out, and make plans to stay out for a while.