ATO White Powder Incident !

The part that I thought was most interesting about this yesterday was the communication about the incident to staff in those buildings.

I was walking past Muralla lane at about 11.30am, and firies and cops were turning up and blocking the street off. Came back to my building on Mort street, and within an hour we all had an email saying there was a white powder incident in the mail room or the ATO building and the lane was closed.

Hubby works in the ATO building and they weren’t told anything! they only found out about when someone from my building called to see if they had been evacuated or air con turned off.

I would have thought the first thing the property people should have done is advised ATO staff so people don’t freak out or jump to conclusions… thats government for you!

It’s actually 30 degrees when a commonwealth still-aired building should be evacuated when the air-conditioning is not functioning.

Although you must also comply to the Australian Standard 1668 part 2 which you must maintain 3.5 ltrs of fresh ventilated air per second per person or simular in a filtration system.

Even if the whole building is not shut down if there are still people using the building you can bet the section where the incident happened was shut of like when there is a fire.

Don’t you think that the possibility of a real infectious substance spreading through a whole building of workers is a greater ohs risk than shutting of air-conditioning until they are sure of what the substance is?

Also if you are a government department it has to reach a certain temp before you are sent home when the air-conditioning is broken/off and I can tell you that it is not a particularly low number either, I have been working here many times when it is stinking hot because the air is broken and we have not been sent home.

Having been involved in a white powder incident in an office recently we took the logical approach and after alerting the guys in the yellow suits we called the bloke that sent the item. Turned out that this nutter had a gripe with the way the world works and decided to send a chunk of what turned out to be wood infested with borers to the Minister. The output from the borers (frass) had spread inside the package and gave rise to the intiial white powder incident…

Commonsense prevailed – we were quickly back at work after giving a couple of statements to the Feds and the nutter recieved a visit the next day from the boys in blue. Aparently sending intimidating items in the mail is an offence! Who would have thought?

i would hazard a guess and say that the first thing that the mail monkey would do is lick his fingers before calling HAZMAT and the spooks.

This wasn’t a mail incident nor was the last. It is just an incident where white powder is found that has been placed suspiciously.

And no… the airconditioning is still going. Shutting the aircon off would allow for us all to go home cause it’s an OHS risk to have uncirculated air in a building.

What?

Blueberry,

I would hazard a guess and say the first is that the mail monkey does is that they’d lick their fingers before calling HAZMAT and the spooks.

Actually i imagin that the first think that happens in one of these situations would be the airconditioning being shut off.

When I had a look it seems to be in the loading dock of 14 and 16 Mort Street where the government vehicles can also access the basement – which would be the ex-DEST now DEEWR.

It would be very nice if the Government would say something to us because all of our airconditioning vents go out on to that street which means potentially we could all be infected if it is real… So even just a “Hey there was a powder incident but it was fake”.

It is quite BS that this is happening and government departments being target because we’re all just humans too, trying to help Australians in every way we can.