The Los Gatos post office was evacuated yesterday after 14 postal workers and one customer became mysteriously ill. People reported an odd odor and a weird metallic taste, and a few people broke out in white hives. The fifteen people were asked to strip to their underwear by a hazmat team, who then hosed them down. (On the bright side, they appear to have been given big yellow poncho/blankets to wear home.)

The customer and five postal workers elected to go to the hospital for precautionary measures, while the others declined further treatment. Everyone seems to have recovered nicely, but the fire department, postal inspectors, and FBI are continuing their investigation. They're still trying to figure out what the source of the contamination was — one postal worker thought it was "ant spray" — while officials have discounted the initial suspicions that it was cyanide.

SFist, who is inordinately fond of the postal service despite its bad rap, hopes they figure out what the chemical in question was, and that it was just some bozo who wrapped up a package of bug spray badly and not another anthraxy thing. (...and why isn't there a special stamp like the breast cancer awareness stamp that we can buy to support the families of the postal workers who were poisoned back in 2001?)