Canada's FIRST AND ONLY mailroom with MASS DECONTAMINATION capability will be located in Toronto, at the 80 Spadina Avenue EXISTech mailroom facility

This will be the WORLD's FIRST AND ONLY eDecon facility

California airport has the most advanced state-of-the art mass decon facility, but hospitals such as Brigham and Women's Hospital have opened a decontamination unit designed to treat victims of biological terrorism.

Two hospitals in Sacremento have decon facilities for cleansing large numbers of patients who have been exposed to chemical agents.

The University of Louisville Hospital, which is the primary teaching hospital for the Universitie's School of Medicine, has a technologically-advanced mass decontamination facility featuring an outside entrance with a shower area for washing off hazardous waste.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center has a decon facility consisting of 10 shower heads permanently fixed in the ceiling of a sidewalk area outside the Emergency Department. Director Ken Browning estimates a capacity of 200 people per hour.

Toronto has had two anthrax mail scares within the last month. Nearly 2,000 government employees were forced from their offices across from the Queen's Park legislature. This has required buildings to be evacuated, with occupants being required to strip naked in the parking lots outside the buildings, to be hosed down with firehoses, and scrubbed down out in the cold, in plain view of television news crews.

Emergency departments are not equipped to handle large numbers of suspected cases of contamination, so they must be decontaminated outside in the cold. Otherwise even one contaminated patient can shut down the entire emergency department.

An experimental mass decon facility is planned for EXISTech Corporation's 80 Spadina Avenue mailroom, in Toronto, scheduled for opening July 5th 2001.

The facility will be used as the locker rooms and change rooms for EXISTech Corporation's mailroom facility, when it is not being used for decontamination drills (or, heaven forbid, actual emergencies).

This facility is to be Canada's first mass decon facility:

• the world's most advanced decon facility, and
• it the world's ONLY experimental decon facility, and
• the world's only teleDecon facility.

The unique hexagonal room design maximizes throughput, and EXISTech Corporation estimates it could decontaminate more than 1000 persons per hour:

Postscript version of this figure

You can also see the proposed layout of the DECON facility within the floor plans of the EXISTech Mailroom.

Because all the valves and controls are remotely operable, this would make it the world's ONLY teledecontamination facility. (world's only eDecon facility).

DECON FACILITY BUDGET (all costs in U.S. dollars)

• 48 upright steel joists, $2 each, total $96.
• 18 sheets frosted opel lexan, 4 by 8 feet, $300 each, total $5400.
• 18 video data projectors, for multimedia instructional presentation backprojected upon the 18 outside walls: $2500 each, total $45000.
• 18 heavy dute optical cross brackets, $20 each, total $120.
• 18 graphics servers, $1000 each, total $18000.
• Six non-optical lexan for internal walls, 4 by 8 foot sheet, $100 each, total $600.
• Six two-way mirrors, lexan, 4 by 8 foot sheet, $300 each, total $1800.
• Six machine vision camera systems, $500 each, total $3000.
• Six LML33 Linux Media Labs capture cards, $495, total $2970.
• Six optical cross brackets, $10 each, total $60.
• Restroom area plumbing fixtures, suitable for computer control, total $5000.
• 10 restroom controls, assuming 2 stalls and 1 sink, 1 soap, and 1 hand dryer, $300 each in each of men's and women's side, total $3000.
• 8 Showers (4 men's, 4 women's), $500 each, total $4000.
• Alpha Server: must have at least 6 PCI slots and one ISA slot. MUST RUN GNU Linux. The facility at 80 Spadian Avenue will run off a Compaq Alpha Server, on loan from EXISTech Corporation.
• Machine vision software packages, including the GNU Linux eDecon software package, will be donated by EXISTech Corporation.