About one-tenth of the 225,000 wearable personal respirator masks the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous nuclear weapons agency ordered in April had arrived at facilities as of Wednesday, and the rest are on their way.
All of the masks ordered by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) from Atlanta-area small business American Dream Builders LLC 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 sites 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 locations a week later, a contract modification posted online Tuesday evening shows.
The NNSA now believes the masks, which if properly worn can protect people from COVID-19, will in full arrive two months later than hoped when the agency on April 27 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.
