Anyone visiting the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) these days should not count on finding a cheap hotel room around Carlsbad, N.M.
Rooms are scarce and midweek rates can run from $148 per night at the Super 8, to $289 at the Days Inn, to $409 at the La Quinta Inns and Suites, according to an Internet search. The rates are fairly eye-popping for a largely rural area, acknowledged Donavan Mager, spokesman for WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership.
The high room cost, driven mainly by workers drawn by a local oil and gas boom, prompted the subcontractor building WIPP’s new ventilation system to buy a local hotel to ensure it will have somewhere for its employees to stay, Mager said Tuesday. If it chooses the contractor could likely resell the property after the ventilation project is done.
Critical Applications Alliance (CAA) in November received a $135 million contract to build a new underground ventilation system at the underground disposal facility for the Energy Department’s transuranic waste. Comprised of Christensen Building Group and Kilgore Industries, both of Houston, the contractor purchased a local “mom and pop” hotel in Carlsbad that came on the market and is refurbishing it for employee use, Mager said.
The booming oil and gas business is also increasing WIPP’s competition for labor and the traffic around the facility.
The attrition level at WIPP has been hovering around 10 percent annually and competition for experienced employees is at a premium, particularly for jobs such as welders, electricians, and mechanics, Mager said.
About 1,555 vehicles per day of non-WIPP traffic now use an access road near the DOE facility. Roughly two-thirds of the outside traffic consists of oil and gas industry trucks, according to an October 2018 Energy Department environmental assessment for a new 3-mile stretch of WIPP bypass road. An additional 3,400 trucks could be added by 2021, when the southeastern New Mexico oil and gas boom is expected to peak.
A subcontractor for construction of the North Access Road Bypass was awarded in December to Granite Construction. The roadwork has started and the project should be completed in January 2020, Mager said.
The new ventilation system, expected to be operational in 2021 to 2022, is intended to triple airflow in the WIPP underground and enable full waste emplacement and mining operations for the first time since the 2014 radiation release that closed the site for nearly three years.
