The first employees who return to Department of Energy headquarters buildings in Washington, D.C., and nearby Maryland, whenever that might be, will get a taste of the new normal their colleagues at nuclear sites have experienced for weeks amid the COVID-19 pandemic, new agency guidance shows.
Temperature checks, pre-arrival symptom questionnaires, and continued social distancing are all mandatory for the first wave of personnel returning to the Forrestal Building in Washington and DOE Germantown as part of their eventual Phase 1 reopenings, according to the DOE Headquarters COVID-19 Return to Federal Workplace Plan published Monday.
Where workspaces don’t allow for 6 feet of spacing between individuals, they will be rearranged so they do — and if they cannot be, people might have to work in staggered shifts so that everyone who shares a space can use it, the guidance says. Certain places, such as security checkpoints, will have plastic barriers to protect the people stationed there from potentially infectious sneezes, coughs, or breath. COVID-19 is a respiratory disease, transmitted commonly from one person’s lungs to another.
Personal protection equipment at DOE headquarters is a maybe. Employees are encouraged, but not required, to wear face coverings at work. Most face coverings cannot stop the wearer from catching COVID-19, but they can prevent the wearer from transmitting it, as asymptomatic people can.
“Depending on availability and demand, face coverings will be provided at facility entrances for those who want one,” according to the reopening guidelines.
All of this has been common practice since mid- to late-April at National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) facilities that have kept personnel on-site, sometimes at a reduced work tempo, to continue ongoing nuclear-weapons refurbishments and planning that have been deemed essential to national security.
The NNSA weapons production sites particularly were early adopters of the screening programs that DOE will need to put in place in order to reopen facilities that, without care, could become hubs for future COVID-19 outbreaks. For example: At the Kansas City National Security Campus in Missouri, remote temperature checks are required for everyone, and personnel with engineering and assembly jobs already get plastic-partitioned workstations and sometimes protective equipment if they cannot maintain distance.
On Friday, an NNSA spokesperson said the semiautonomous weapons agency’s own Recovery and Re-Entry Plan was essentially based on the broader DOE reopening approach.
Energy Department headquarters is not imminently reopening. There are four reopening phases altogether, running from Phase 0 to Phase 3. Both headquarters buildings are in Phase 0 now, meaning only people working on the agency’s absolutely most essential missions are allowed inside. Normal operations, something resembling work before COVID-19, would not begin until Phase 3.
Phase 1 involves returning mission-critical personnel to work “whose jobs can be better performed onsite than through telework,” the department said. Self-identified vulnerable federal employees will not have to return to the site during Phase 1, nor will those “who live with or provide care for individuals in the vulnerable population.” Federal employees who are caring for others and cannot find caregiving services during work hours also will not have to come back in the first phase.
Even the first phase of return to work is contingent on local and regional conditions. To begin Phase 1, a site’s host region must identify a decline in reports of flu- and COVID-19-like symptoms, and COVID-19 cases over two weeks. Regional hospitals also must have the capacity to care for “all patients without crisis care,” and healthcare workers should have access to virus- and antibody testing themselves.
Phase 2 would see more federal support staff return to the sites.
There are about 14,000 federal employees across the DOE complex, including those who do not work on defense-nuclear programs.
The management and operations contractors of major DOE sites, including National Nuclear Security Administration sites, are responsible for writing their own reopening guidelines. Those published Monday apply to DOE federal sites and on-site support services contractors who work there.
