National Nuclear Security Administration sites this week started receiving respirators ordered in April to help protect personnel from COVID-19.
It was forward progress in a week where COVID-19 cases nationwide continued to spike, and DOE headquarters cleared more federal employees to return to Washington-area buildings in the second phase of the agency’s return-to-the-office plan.
As of midweek, about one-tenth of the 225,000 wearable personal respirator masks the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) ordered April 27 had been shipped to facilities across the country. The rest are on their way to the sites, an NNSA spokesperson said Wednesday.
All of the masks ordered from Atlanta-area small business American Dream Builders have shipped to the U.S. from China, and 25,000 have already “been delivered to designated NNSA labs, plants, sites, and offices,” an agency spokesperson said Wednesday by email.
Another 59,000 had been shipped to NNSA locations as of Wednesday morning. and the remainder should be sent by July 8, according to the spokesperson. The agency has extended its vendor’s contract until July 15 in the hope that masks slated to ship next week arrive at NNSA facilities a week later, a contract modification posted online Tuesday evening shows.
“Six of NNSA’s eight labs, plants, and sites will receive KN-95 masks from this contract, along with our headquarter locations in Albuquerque, Germantown, and Washington, D.C.,” the agency spokesperson said.
The NNSA believes the masks, which if properly worn can protect people from the novel coronavirus 2019, will in full arrive two months later than hoped when the agency awarded American Dream Builders a fixed-price contract now worth about $415,000.
The NNSA wants 186,000 KN-95-rated masks for contractors at various sites, plus 39,000 for federal employees, according to a procurement note posted online in April. The agency roughly had a combined 44,000 contractor and federal employees as of November. More than 1,750 of those are federal personnel, according to the NNSA’s fiscal 2021 budget request. At that rate, the order from American Dream Builders would provide about 20 masks per federal employee and about four masks per contractor.
The NNSA initially wanted delivery by May 15, but extended the deadline to May 29 after the Chinese masks American Dream Builders planned to source were banned for use as respirators by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on May 7. That forced the company to source a more expensive model that still had FDA approval. So, along with delaying delivery, the NNSA had to increase the value of the company’s contract by about 70%.
That boosted the per-mask price from about $1 to roughly $1.80.
When the post-Memorial Day weekend came and went without delivery — this time because of “order and shipping backlogs,” the NNSA said at the time — the agency stretched the deadline to Tuesday. It then slipped again, even as marks were at various points of transport.
KN-95 is a Chinese standard that is roughly equivalent to the U.S. N95 standard that indicates a mask filters 95% of airborne particulates.
More Workers Waved Back in to DOE Headquarters
Starting Monday, the Energy Department cleared 1,400 federal employees — plus some support services contractors — to return to office buildings in the Washington region as part of the second phase of the agency’s return-to-the-office plan.
Also in Phase 2, DOE will now allow a select number of visitors at the D.C.-area buildings, according to a statement posted Wednesday. The agency is also relaxing some restrictions on travel, including allowing international trips for mission-critical purposes.
There are about 1,000 NNSA employees at the Forrestal Building in downtown D.C., and the Germantown Building in nearby suburban Maryland. They are among the roughly 7,000 DOE employees in the capital region.
The Phase 1 reopening that started June 8 brought back about 250 mission-essential staff, such as those who need access to classified work space and employees required to pave the way for those who will return in Phase 2. In the second phase, employees deemed vulnerable to COVID-19, but who want to work in their offices anyway, may volunteer to report back to work. In Phase 3, DOE buildings essentially will operate as they did pre-COVID-19, according to current plans.
The entire DOE headquarters corps mostly worked from home from late March to early June due to fears of spreading COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that broke out in Wuhan, China, last year. A few senior DOE managers occasionally reported to Forrestal for work.
Just before Phase 1 of the reopening, a DOE employee at the Germantown branch tested positive for COVID-19, the agency announced this week. The person was last in Germantown on June 2. That made for at least 18 confirmed cases of the disease among the DOE headquarters workforce, one of which was fatal.
The U.S. has more COVID-19 cases than any nation on Earth and has for some time. U.S. cases have spiked in the early summer, with the daily count of new cases nationwide reaching 50,000 this week for the first time since the outbreak was confirmed to have reached the U.S. in January. The U.S. had almost 2.7 million confirmed cases and more than 128,062 deaths at deadline, up from some 2.4 million cases and 124,424 deaths last week.
Sandia Buildings Reopen
By Wednesday, a pair of buildings at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., which had closed down for deep cleanings after employees there tested positive for COVID-19, had reopened.
Building 836 reopened June 27. It houses Sandia’s Weapons Engineering Product Realization Environment facility: a sort of virtual reality workshop where personnel can examine representations of nuclear-weapon designs.
Building 867, the Military Liaison Training and Storage building, reopened on Wednesday.
Sandia announced June 26 that both Building 836 and Building 867 had closed after employees at each tested positive for COVID-19.
Following its usual procedure for rebooting work space used by someone with COVID-19, Sandia sanitized the closed buildings, cleaning floors and surfaces, and tossing any food not left in a refrigerator.
Sandia has about 12,500 employees, of whom between 65% and 70% were teleworking after May 27, when the National Nuclear Security Administration approved the lab’s plan to start returning more people to the sites. Prior to that approval, between 70% and 75% of the workforce were teleworking during the pandemic. The remainder were either working on-site, or unable to work, wherever they were.
