Adding a Level 4 bioweapons research facility to Site 300, the high-explosives experimental test facility of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is a bad idea for anyone living in and around Tracy.

The new bio-lab would study diseases with no known cures. The new facility would replace the existing lab on Plum Island, off the coast of Long Island, N.Y., which houses Lab 257, the reported source of the bioweapons breach that led to the infection of the entire continent with West Nile virus. Presumably, many employees of the old facility would be transferred to the new facility, quite possibly some who may have been involved in that breach.

The University of California would manage the facility. The campus of University of California, Davis, was previously proposed as a site for a Level 4 high-security bio-defense lab, but that was scrapped after a rhesus monkey used for breeding purposes (breeding what, I wonder) escaped from a medical research center on the Davis campus in February 2003.

It is thus conceivable that we would have in our backyard, a high-risk biofacility with both management and employees associated with prior breaches.

The additional risk of a breach of anthrax, small pox, Ebola or some other new and deadly designer microbe from a location prone to earthquakes (a stone’s throw away from the Greenville fault) compounds the threat to those of us who live and work in areas that would be severely impacted.

We are told of enemy forces in the Middle East and elsewhere that stockpile weapons among civilians, and yet we live next to the largest cache of plutonium on the planet at the main lab in Livermore. Livermore lab is one of the two national weapons labs that are most certainly high on the Department of Homeland Security’s list of terrorist risks. Disaster scenarios that include the devastation of Tracy undoubtedly exist. Clearly, new and additional scenarios would be needed with the additional risks the new facility would bring, not to mention, we’d climb even higher on the terrorists’ target list.

If you don’t buy any of this, do you think the additional 300 jobs outweighs the impact on your property value Surely, this would be required in your disclosure. Of course, it may bring an opportunity to start a business related to the hazardous materials industry.

• Daniel Wells is a software development business owner and has lived in Tracy since January 2000.