Workers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state are this week coping with what the National Weather Service described in a Monday bulletin as “dangerous heat.”
At deadline, the high for Monday was forecast to reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit with daytime highs expected to remain above 100 degrees F throughout the week. Early Sunday afternoon in Richland, Wash., the temperature reached 109 degrees F with an anticipated high of 114.
The excessive heat warning is expected to last through Thursday, and the easterly winds, hot temperatures, and relative humidity around 10% “will also make for perfect conditions for easy fire starts by sparks or other types of ignition,” the National Weather Service said in a discussion of the current conditions.
The fire danger at Hanford is “very high” according to a website run by the Leidos-led infrastructure services contractor for the 586-square mile federal property, Hanford Mission Integration Solutions.
A little more than a year ago, the fire department from Hanford helped extinguish a wildfire on Gable Mountain that burned 9,000 acres at the former plutonium-production reservation. In August 2016 a wildfire charred about 35,000 acres of Hanford property outside of the security fence at the DOE facility.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and other DOE sites in the West are suffering under extreme drought, a manager with a cleanup contractor there said recently.
Fire has already struck one DOE nuclear installation in the West this year. In early June firefighters from the Nevada National Security Site contained the Cherrywood fire, started in mid-May and burned about 26,000 acres.
