The U.S. Postal Service closed the 700,000-square-foot facility Sunday to allow testing for contamination and shifted mail sorting to sites in suburban Maryland. An air mail facility near Baltimore-Washington International Airport also was temporarily closed.

Two people who worked at the Brentwood facility, which handles mail for the Capitol and dozens of government agencies, died Monday, apparently from anthrax, health officials announced. Two other workers were hospitalized with the inhaled form of the life-threatening disease.

Mail to Washington from around the country passes through Brentwood, which is located near Union Station, the headquarters of Black Entertainment Television and the Capitol, which reopened Monday after testing for an anthrax scare of its own.

The items are then sorted for distribution to local post offices, homes and businesses.

The facility opened in August 1986 and is the only postal center with a section for government mail, making deliveries to about 230 federal agencies.

It handled an anthrax-tainted letter sent last week to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., exposing more than two dozen members of his staff to the disease.

Letter carriers were on the job Monday _ and some were taking precautions.

At one downtown Washington post office, workers wore blue-tinted surgical gloves to handle the mail. They said the mail they process comes through Brentwood.

The Postal Service is making gloves and masks available to its workers. The postmaster general promised Monday that mail delivery will not be disrupted.

Vince Sombrotto, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, said, "We will not be deterred from doing our job because, as the president just said a few moments ago, 'We're all soldiers in this war.'" The union represents 240,000 letter carriers nationwide.

Sombrotto and Postmaster General John E. Potter met privately Monday with President Bush, who "expressed his admiration and his gratitude to these individuals, to their membership, their strength of character and their commitment to their country," Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said.

Drew Von Bergen, a spokesman for the letter carriers union, said his office wasn't flooded with telephone calls from members, partly because of information the union has passed out.

"We've given it to them, asked them to be very careful in monitoring the mail (and) if they see something suspicious to contact a supervisor right away," he said.

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