On September 16, 2019, an explosion occurred in a decontamination room on the fifth floor of a six story building at the laboratory complex. At the time, the area was being renovated, and purportedly there were no biohazard substances in the room. Windows were blown out and one contractor was sent to intensive care at a hospital with severe burns. The lab management assured the World Health Organization that the smallpox repository had not been impacted by the event. However, in a worse case scenario, this does not rule out the possibility that some form of pathogens might have been dispersed by the blast.