At deadline Friday, winter weather had finally blown over New Mexico and Texas after an early-week barrage that gave all the nuclear-weapons sites in those states at one snow day.
Non-essential dayshift employees at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, were most affected by an early winter storm that crusted the panhandle counties of Potter and Randall with snow and ice and cancelled the day shift from Monday through Thursday.
Reminder to Pantexans: Please be cautious when returning to work on Friday as refreezing of road, parking lot, and sidewalk surfaces is possible.
— Pantex Plant (@PantexPlant) October 29, 2020
In New Mexico, Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque had delayed openings on Wednesday and Monday and closed down on Tuesday. Albuquerque got a foot of snow in some places, and parts of the state were briefly under a blizzard warning this week.
Los Alamos National Laboratory to the north also got about a foot of snow. The lab sent employees home early on Monday with the system rolling in and closed entirely on Tuesday. In something akin to rain on a wedding day, neither Pajarito Mountain nor Ski Santa Fe had yet opened for the season this week.
Meanwhile, a far distant storm in the South Pacific delayed a Minuteman III test launch by a day. The missile, from the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, finally shot early Thursday morning, local time, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
And last, Hurricane Zeta slammed into Louisiana on Wednesday, then swept northeast, giving a wide berth to the only nuclear-weapon sites in its path, the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. National Nuclear Security Administration headquarters in Washington got a long rain storm Thursday, when the remnants of the storm blew out into the Atlantic.
