Local Heroes: Rain, Snow, Dark of Night & Anthrax couldn‘t Stop Postal Workers

March 6, 2002

The anthrax scare that began last fall sent shockwaves through the country, thrusting postal workers into the limelight and shedding new perspective on a service many of us take for granted. Along with firefighters, Northern Express readers selected postal workers as “Best Local Heroes“ during this year‘s survey.
We spoke recently with Dan Windsor, officer in charge at the Traverse City Post Office, to get an update on how things are going.

NE: How many employees work at the Traverse City Post Office?
Windsor: Between the plant, which processes mail for the 496 area, and customer services, there are about 300 employees.

NE: What‘s the range of pay for postal workers?
Windsor: Between $30,000 and $45,000, generally. We have part-time employees on our rural carrier routes that are paid a little less than that, but anywhere from $13 to $20 an hour would be the norm.

NE: What steps did you take when the anthrax scare arose last fall?
Windsor: Initially, as information became available, we stepped up our personal precautions for employees as far as wearing gloves, and if some chose to wear face masks, we provided face masks for them. The initial part of the anthrax scare was really a lack of knowledge, and as more information became available, we just implemented that into training programs for our employees and went from there.

NE: Was there a lot of anxiety among the workers over the anthrax scare?
Windsor: Initially, there was a lot of anxiety, but as information became available and we understood what the threat was, it settled down. I would say the awareness is still there of the potential risks, but as far as anxiety, we‘ve tried to educate our employees so they know what the risk is and how to minimize the risk.

NE: Was it blown out of proportion?
Windsor: It‘s always easy to look back in hindsight and say things were blown out of proportion. Even at this point, they‘re looking at the irradiation machines and re-evaluating things like that, but that‘s the process with anything... to have a good overwhelming response and then to cut back. When they found out there was anthrax in the mail system, with no experience dealing with it, they felt that the risk was minimal at the time, and then when people started to get sick and die, they realized they needed to step up the response.

NE: A lot of people might have thought about quitting a postal job at that point...
Windsor: We have a very dedicated work force here. The main concern through that whole thing was to be able to process and deliver the mail. All 300 of our employees are members of the community and realize the importance of mail. And they also realize that although the risk of cross-contamination was there, it was a minimal risk and the precautions they took were what the Center for Disease Control had recommended.

NE: Is anthrax still a concern at this point?
Windsor: We‘re concerned to the point of anything our employees handle. In addition to the potential for anthrax, they handle medical samples, scientific samples, a lot of things that are caustic that they don‘t know about. Every once in a while, a question comes up as far as what‘s in a package, what are the possibilities of it being hazardous. And if there‘s a package identified as being suspicious, we have a process in place where we isolate it and go through a procedure to take care of any employees that may have come in contact with it.

NE: Is that a common occurrence at the Traverse City Post Office?
Windsor: We have that happen almost on a daily basis, where a package will come through that‘s broken or leaking. Our plant handles probably 10,000 parcels a night for the whole area, and people don‘t always pack things correctly and sometimes things break.
People who send parcels through the mail should make sure to package them adequately, with no hazardous warning stickers on old boxes, such as bleach. These packages get kicked back and must be repacked, taking longer to send.

NE: What‘s the attitude of the workers when that happens?
Windsor: Pretty much, the general rule is they just take it in stride. That‘s part of their normal everyday job. Like anyone, you take precautions to minimize the risk, but the risk is there.

NE: What‘s the biggest myth about postal workers?
Windsor: I guess one of the myths is the attitude of the employees. We have a very committed workforce and very low turnover. Sometimes you‘ll have envelopes where the addresses are poor or we‘re having a hard time finding a customer because they‘ve moved, and our employees go above and beyond to try and track somebody down. And if you take a look at our work force, we have a lot of volunteer firefighters on our staff, we have people who work in emergency medicine and ambulance services, a couple of our rural letter carriers are very involved in the angel program and provide Christmas for about 200 kids each year. The list of things and the community aspect of our employees just goes on and on.

NE: We hear in the news about shootings now and then in bigger cities, but aren‘t those isolated incidences?
Windsor: They‘re few and far between, and the postal service is a cross-section of the communities that we serve. Our communities have people with mental illness and criminals, and although we do our best to weed those people out through our hiring process, we‘re not immune to society‘s problems. But by and large, our work force is very dedicated, very honest, very intelligent and very community-minded.

NE: What are some of the changes taking place at the post office?
Windsor: Our employees are going through some changes internally with automated systems we‘re putting in place. We‘ve gone from hand-sorting all our letters to machines with optical characters reading all of the mail. So it‘s a changing time for the postal service and for our employees, but we intend, and our employees intend, to provide the best possible service to the community.

NE: It‘s always amazing that a letter can be mailed in one city and arrive in another city the next day...
Windsor: We have clerks here that have learned the city addresses, and they‘ll sort about 1,000 pieces of mail an hour and break it down to all our carrier routes. We‘ve got about 50 routes here in town, and they know where a piece of mail goes just through memorization of the addresses and routes.

NE: And the mail gets delivered in rain, sleet, snow, heat...
Windsor: I can‘t remember a time in recent history when we‘ve stopped delivering the mail for any kind of weather. Sometimes there are specific streets we can‘t get down or maybe someone hasn‘t plowed out a mailbox or whatever, but we still make an attempt every day to deliver the route.