The Hanford Site in Washington state, the Department of Energy’s largest and most costly nuclear cleanup property, has been dubbed “Storm Ready” under a voluntary program with the National Weather Service, DOE said Tuesday.
The National Weather Service program is meant to assist emergency managers at the former plutonium production complex beef up operations during severe storms through communication, mitigation and community preparedness, the DOE said in a Tuesday release.
Thanks to the storm-ready designation, the federal weather agency could use its meteorologists to support the emergency operations center at Hanford and DOE’s site services contractor, Hanford Mission Integration Solutions. The Leidos-led contractor runs both the emergency ops center and the Hanford Meteorological Station.
The National Weather Service and DOE in April confirmed that the 120-degree F temperature recorded at the Hanford weather station on June 29, 2021, is a new all-time high for Washington state. The temperature spike came during a summer heat wave around Hanford.
Hanford’s “Storm Ready” designation was announced during a recent visit to the site by the National Weather Service’s Western Region Director Grant Cooper.
