A motorist who died in an automobile crash inside the Savannah River Site in South Carolina on Feb. 7 was not an employee of the Department of Energy or its contractors.
“It wasn’t connected to our work,” a DOE spokesperson said by email. “It does appear that it was just a tragic accident — one of the cars crossed the center line” on Highway 125, a public road that passes through the facility near the city of Aiken.
The two-lane state highway is on the outer edge of the Energy Department site and motorists don’t need to go through checkpoints in order to access it, the spokesperson said Monday.
While the 17-mile stretch of highway is open to the public, vehicles are prohibited from stopping except for emergencies, according to the South Carolina Highway Patrol.
The victim, 53-year-old Gloria Williams of Augusta, Ga., was driving a Lexus that was hit by another automobile, a Honda, traveling in the opposite direction, the Highway Patrol said. Both Williams and a passenger in her car were not wearing seat belts. The passenger was ejected from the Lexus and hospitalized with serious injuries. Williams was not ejected. The driver of the Honda was also injured.
Williams was pronounced dead upon arrival at a hospital in nearby Augusta, according to Barnwell County, S.C. Coroner Lloyd Ward.
No charges had been filed as of Thursday and the investigation remains open, police said. The crash was reported Friday by the Aiken. S.C., Standard.
Five sessions on federal environmental cleanup contracting have been scheduled for the 45th Waste Management Symposia from March 3 through 7 in Phoenix.
Business sessions on the agenda are:
- A Monday, March 4, session on small business contracting to provide an overview of programs within the Department of Energy’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization.
- A Tuesday, March 5, quarterly business forum for the DOE Office of Environmental Management will feature a status review of every major cleanup procurement. While there is no separate fee to attend, separate registration is required by contacting Mary Wilson by Feb. 27 at [email protected]. Registrants should provide their name, title, and company name.
- A March 5 session on small business opportunities within DOE and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will focus on both the weapons complex and the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP). Panelists from government and prime contractors will discuss opportunities for small and disadvantaged firms.
- A Wednesday, March 6, session will examine the end-state contracting model at DOE, an approach designed to give the agency more flexibility to speed remediation and ultimate site closure.
- A March 6 session will address DOE’s major procurement plans and strategy, which includes perspectives from the Energy Communities Alliance (ECA), Energy Facility Contractors Group (EFCOG), and the Energy Technology and Environmental Business Association (ETEBA).
The Waste Management Symposia, an international conference on radioactive waste management and related topics, is scheduled at the Phoenix Convention Center.
The Wednesday meeting of the Hanford Advisory Board in Richland, Wash., has been canceled due to bad weather. Heavy snowfall across Washington state and a forecast for freezing rain prompted the cancellation.
The meeting had already been reduced to a single day administrative session because the partial shutdown of the federal government in January prevented the 30-days’ notice from being published in the Federal Register. As a result, plans for a second day of meetings planned for Thursday were canceled and the board was prohibited from taking any action.
Items on the agenda for Wednesday will be moved to the next board meeting on April 10-11. The full board has not met since September after the session in December was canceled because the first of two days fell on the national day of mourning for former President George H.W. Bush. Because the board met in Seattle in September, its last meeting near the Hanford Site was in June. The board typically holds five full meetings a year, mostly near the Department of Energy facility.
Most work at Hanford was canceled last weekend because of drifting snow and closed highways accessing the site.
The Department of Energy is changing the rules for its agency-wide Employee Concerns Program, removing a mandate that employees be allowed to have someone other than their immediate supervisor inspect their claims, and aiming to resolve concerns quickly.
The Employee Concerns Program is a sort of whistleblower channel for agency and contractor employees.
The old DOE order, issued in 2001, prohibited an employee’s immediate supervisor from investigating that worker’s concern, “unless otherwise agreed to by the employee.” That directive is absent from DOE Order order 442.1B, which was recently published online and dated Jan. 31.
The new order also aims to close employee concerns within a few months: “The goal of the [Employee Concerns Program] is to close Employee Concerns within 90 calendar days from date of receipt of the Employee Concern. However, closure of the Employee Concern will depend on the supporting information and circumstances of the Employee Concern.”
The old order set no ideal timeline for closing concerns.
There is also no mention in Order 442.1B of the quarterly and annual reports on employee concerns required by the 2001 order. Under the old order, employee concerns managers had to report periodically on employee concerns trends, such as the frequency and nature of reports.
The new order, like the old order, applies to DOE and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration. Both contractors and federal workers may use the program. Contractors whose contracts oblige them to comply with the older Employee Concerns Program rules must comply with those rules until and unless DOE modifies their contracts to adopt the new program rules, according to Order 442.1B.
