HSS REPORT REVEALS DETAILS ABOUT Y-12 SECURITY BREACH

By ExchangeMonitor

In Congressional hearings, a host of reviews and various speeches, much has been revealed about the problems that allowed three elderly peace activists to reach the most secure portion of the Y-12 National Security Complex last summer, and a newly released review from the Department of Energy’s Office of Health, Safety and Security provides another glimpse into the incident. NW&M Monitor obtained the September 2012 HSS review through a Freedom of Information Act request, and the 110-page, highly redacted document reinforced the conclusions and underlying causes reached by other entities in the wake of the security breach, which the HSS report said was “a fundamental failure of the security system.” Security contractors—protective force contractor WSI-Oak Ridge and management and operating contractor B&W Y-12—were given too much freedom by their federal overseers to make decisions, and contractor assurance systems gave feds an inaccurate sense of the performance of the contractors in the lead-up to the security breach, which was driven in part by camera outages, high false alarm rates, and improper response from Y-12’s guard force. “Weaknesses in contractor, site office, and DNS oversight and assurance systems essentially blinded NNSA senior management to the overall health of the protection program at Y -12, and also to early indicators of problems that, if corrected, might have mitigated the security breach,” the HSS report said.

Cutting costs was often a priority, the report revealed, which served to degrade the security posture at the site. The report noted that a 2012 B&W plan (scrapped after the security breach) would have reduced protective force staffing levels by 55 workers, and headquarters recommended that the number of alarm maintenance technicians be cut even though the program’s performance was inadequate and Y-12 officials had requested to increase the number of technicians. Budget pressure also contributed to major scope reductions in the site’s Security Improvements Project and a decision to shift maintenance workers to support the installation of the site’s Argus intrusion detection system by the end of Fiscal Year 2012, which increased the backlog of maintenance for security equipment at the site. “In short, inadequacies in YSO [Y-12 Site Office] oversight and DNS [Defense Nuclear Security] programmatic responsibilities, combined with performance incentives that either emphasized early, under-budget completion of projects or rewarded insufficient performance, contributed to an organizational culture that was inadequately focused on meeting high standards for security performance,” HSS said in the report.

Comments are closed.