Non-essential workers in many areas around the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state are staying home Monday due to adverse weather, according to an advisory posted on an operations website run by a contractor.
The stay-home advisory applied to non-essential day shift workers north and south of the Wye Barricade, including Richland, according to the notice.
Essential employees needed to maintain minimum safe operations should follow their normal work schedule, according to the notice. The website advised that workers coming in today should allow for longer commutes due to winter driving conditions.
Roughly 11,000 federal and contractor workers are employed at the cleanup site for the former government plutonium production complex. Many, however, continue to telecommute due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
One to three inches of snow is forecast around the Richland area.
While there was no snow in the forecast for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, workers there might want to bundle up with temperatures at minus-2 degrees F shortly after 6 a.m. Mountain Time. Temperatures at the complex, however, were expected to reach a balmy 29 degrees later today.
