LONDON — It has a lot going for it: a two-story house on a leafy cul-de-sac, a short walk from schools, parks and a train station.
And then there’s the downside.
A year after a nerve-agent attack nearly killed a Russian former spy and his daughter, the enormous job of decontaminating his former home in Salisbury, England, is complete, the government announced on Friday.
Hundreds of specialists spent a total of 13,000 hours cleaning up 13 sites in and around Salisbury that had been tainted by the nerve agent, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said. The house where Sergei V. Skripal lived, and where he and his daughter, Yulia S. Skripal, were poisoned, was the last to be pronounced decontaminated.
Though Mr. Skripal appears to have been the target of the attack, five people were sickened by exposure to the chemical, including one who died.
Breathing through respirators and clad in sweltering hazardous materials suits, the decontamination workers — including 190 British Army and Royal Air Force personnel — combed through each of the sites and sent about 5,000 samples for testing at the nearby government laboratory at Porton Down, many of which had to be destroyed. They even removed the roof of the Skripal house.
Backing them up were contractors and people from multiple local, county and national government agencies. On Twitter, Tyrone Urch, an Army lieutenant general, called it “a monumental and courageous effort by thousands of people.”
The environment department said it had turned over control of the house to Wiltshire Council, the local government for the county that includes Salisbury.
“Work will begin shortly to reconstruct and refurbish the house so it can return to being a home again,” Alistair Cunningham, who is leading the council’s recovery efforts, said in a statement. The council is talking with people in the neighborhood “as it is important their views are taken into account on how it is used in the future.”
It remains to be seen whether they will have trouble persuading people who might live in the house, or use it in some other way, that every last microscopic trace of one of the deadliest toxins devised by science has really been removed.
The announcement that the work was done, and that the house had been handed over to the county council, ended one chapter in a bizarre and lethal story, straight out of a Cold War espionage novel, that has badly strained relations between Russia and the West.
Mr. Skripal had worked for the Russian military intelligence agency, G.R.U., until he was imprisoned for passing information to the British. In 2010, he was sent to Britain in an exchange of imprisoned agents, and settled in Salisbury, a small cathedral city southwest of London.
On March 4, 2018, he and his daughter, who was visiting from Russia, were found unresponsive on a park bench in Salisbury. British scientists identified the poison involved as a Novichok, a type of nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union.
Britain contends that agents of Mr. Skripal’s former employer flew to London under assumed names, took a train to Salisbury, applied the Novichok to the front door handle of his home, returned to London and flew home, all in the span of two days. Britain’s allies have backed up the findings of London’s investigation, which produced substantial evidence that was made public.
The Kremlin denied any involvement, floating various theories, ranging from the plausible to the contradictory to the absurd, but offered no evidence.
The incident led to sanctions against Russia, the expulsion of about 150 Russian government employees from Britain and its allies, and the expulsion from Russia of a similar number of people working for those countries.
Detective Sgt. Nick Bailey, the first police officer to enter the Skripal home on the day the first victims were found, was exposed, despite wearing protective gear, and became very ill. He recovered, but he and his family had to give up their home and everything in it, rather than take the risk that he had brought traces of the deadly chemical home with him.
Places the Skripals and Sergeant Bailey had visited were cordoned off and tested for contamination, the police gave instructions to the public not to pick anything up off the ground, and a sense of dread gripped Salisbury. Tourism, a pillar of the local economy, plummeted.
Nearly three months after the Skripals took ill, two more people, Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley, were sickened at Mr. Rowley’s house in Amesbury, a nearby town, and the cycle of fear, quarantines and public warnings began again.
Investigators said Mr. Rowley had found a discarded perfume bottle and had given it to Ms. Sturgess, his girlfriend — but it was the vessel the Russians had used for the Novichok. She died and he survived.
In the end, officials said, traces of Novichok were found in homes, stores, a shopping center, a pub, a restaurant, a church, offices, a police station and two ambulance stations.
Through it all, Mr. Cunningham said, “Salisbury has proved it is resilient, positive and looking forward.”
Source : Nytimes
