After some logistical and regulatory road bumps, an Atlanta-area small business has shipped nearly a quarter-million respirator masks to U.S. nuclear weapons sites, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
“All 225,000 masks have been shipped and are in transit to their respective NNSA facilities,” a spokesperson for the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapon agency wrote Friday in an email.
The NNSA ordered the masks on April 27 from Vendor American Dream Builders. Properly worn, the equipment can protect the wearer from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that broke out in China last year.
Six of NNSA’s main sites — the agency has not said which — will receive shares of the order. NNSA headquarters facilities in Washington, D.C., Germantown, Md., and Albuquerque, N.M., will also get an unquantified share of the order.
The NNSA ordered 186,000 China-made KN-95-rated masks for contractors at various locations, 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). 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.
