Enterprise Assessments Checking Out Summer Head Injury at Kansas City

The Department of Energy’s Enterprise Assessments office, one of the agency’s internal watchdogs, will check out an incident last summer at the Kansas City National Security Campus that resulted in one employee getting what the site called a mild concussion.

Among the things the watchdog will look at — in the wake of the employee getting a face full of nitrogen that caused him to pass out, fall and hit his head and neck on shelving and materials on the way down — are “the programs governing maintenance activities with the potential for worker exposure to hazardous energies or atmospheres at the Kansas City National Security Campus,” Anthony Pierpoint, direct of the Enterprise Assessments (EA) office’s enforcement office, wrote in a Feb. 15 letter to Eric Wollerman, president of Honeywell Federal Manufacturing and Technologies.

The headquarters-based EA office is stepping in more than a year after the management contractor for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) non-nuclear manufacturing site reported that the employee on June 14 briefly lost consciousness after opening a specialized storage unit containing parts that had to be protected in an inert nitrogen atmosphere.

An ambulance took the employee to a local hospital, and the worker contacted the site medical office the next day with his diagnosis, according to Kansas City.