Battelle Energy Alliance has paid the Energy Department $60,000 to settle an electrical accident that happened last year at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), a company spokesperson confirmed this week.
“The DOE Office of Enforcement received the BEA-signed copy of Consent Order WCO-2016-01, and payment for the monetary remedy, on May 5, 2016,” a spokesperson for Battelle said by email on Monday. A copy of the consent order was uploaded to DOE’s website on May 9.
The incident itself took place April 23, 2015, while three electrical linemen performing preventive maintenance on a vacuum breaker in the Scoville Substation in the Central Facilities Area, according to a lessons-learned document INL produced after the accident. During the procedure, one of the workers was attempting to use an insulated pole called a hotstick to free a cable that had gotten hung up on another piece of equipment. While trying to free the cable, the worker inadvertently flipped the cable onto an energized 12.5-kilovolt electric line, resulting in an an arc flash — the equivalent of artificial lightning.
“None of the three linemen were injured, though they were were taken to our on-site medical facility for a standard precautionary assessment,” Ed Anderson, chief operating officer for INL’s facilities and site services directorate, said in a Tuesday telephone interview. Moreover, none of the workers were fired from the lab’s roughly 20-member power management group, Anderson said.
There have been “no incidents at Scoville since then,” said Anderson. The site and the power management group have likewise been subject to a “tremendous amount of oversight since the event.”
Besides its own internal review, Battelle hired Chicago-based consulting firm Strategic Talent Solutions to review the accident and the lab’s safety procedures, Anderson said.
The two reviews essentially determined the workers were overconfident after having performed the maintenance in the past, and that the three linemen did not look out for one another closely enough, or heed established safety procedures — which were themselves deficient, according to the lessons-learned document.
The consent order signed by Mark Peters, INL director and president of lab prime contractor Battelle Energy Alliance, noted deficiencies in “BEA’s hazard identification and assessment procedure, electrical safety program, protective equipment selection process, hazard prevention and abatement procedure, and safety training program.”
These, Anderson said, have been addressed. Moreover, Anderson said he has toured the DOE weapons complex to tell and retell the story of the arc flash, and share the lab’s response to the near-miss.
With the fine paid and DOE and its contractor apparently square of over the accident, Anderson said he was “very proud of the guys; we’re in a good place.”
