Building 470
building in Maryland, United States
Building 470 — also called the Pilot Plant, or sometimes "the Tower", or "Anthrax Tower" — was a seven-story steel and brick building at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, United States, used in the small-scale production of biological warfare (BW) agents. The building, a Cold War era structure, was transferred from the Department of Defense to the National Cancer Institute-Frederick (a unit of the National Institutes of Health) in 1988, to which it belonged until 2003 when it was demolished.
Structure and design
Building 470 was the tallest structure on the Fort Detrick grounds and for many years was the tallest in Frederick County. The structure of the building was unique: a seven-story tower, the configuration of which was dictated by the two 2,500-gallon, three-story high fermentors housed within. Although the building was hermetically sealed and negatively pressurized, false windows and window-sills were added to the exterior during construction in an effort to pass the unusually large structure off as a barracks or office building. Several of the floors of the building were catwalks (steel grating), such that someone, for example, on the fifth floor looked down upon other workers three floors below. (These tanks were used to perfect methods of bacteriological agent production and to provide a source of small amounts of these agents for the development and testing work done elsewhere on the facility. Production of anthrax in bulk for use in actual munitions was done at larger facilities in Arkansas and Indiana.)
The bottom two floors were, in the 1950s and '60s, where scientists showered and changed into street clothes after working with lethal agents. (After work, they returned home to their families where they were prohibited from talking about their livelihood.) A network of pipes fed into two large "kill tanks" in the basement, where unused biological agents were flushed and subjected to a treatment that rendered them harmless.
The top floor contained a powerful ventilation system that kept the building at "negative pressure" (air pressure outside was always greater than inside), a redundant safety feature.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Building 470” is building in Maryland, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Building, building and Maryland, not as a finished interpretation.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4986458. Authority coordinates are 39.434, -77.431. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1988 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Building 470” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.