There are 88 active cases of novel coronavirus 2019 infection within the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management complex, an agency official said via email Thursday.
That is down significantly from the 149 active COVID-19 cases reported one week earlier, although multiple infections were reported this week at facilities in New Mexico, South, Carolina, and Washington state.
As of Friday morning, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina had confirmed a total of 456 cases of COVID-19 among its 11,000-member workforce. However, 413 of those individuals have recovered and been cleared to return to work, according to a posting on the DOE website for Savannah River.
The total case count at SRS, which has facilities for both the DOE cleanup office and the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), is up 18 from the prior week total of 456.
In order to curb in-person interactions and slow the spread of the virus, most DOE remediation sites in March scaled back to bare bones operations. It commenced a remobilization effort in May to gradually return to pre-pandemic operation levels.
Savannah River is currently in Phase 1 of DOE’s restart program, meaning most people are still either working from home or collecting paid leave although some doing key jobs, or tasks that require little personal protective equipment, are back on-site.
Meanwhile, the prime contractor for the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico has now confirmed a total of 24 cases among its employees, bringing the site-wide count to 29 to date during the pandemic.
In a memo sent to employees Monday, President and Project Manager Sean Dunagan said Nuclear Waste Partnership over the weekend confirmed five additional infections. One more case has been confirmed since then, according to WIPP.
Four have been working at the WIPP site and were last at the facility between Aug. 18 and Aug. 26. The other has worked remotely since March. All are showing symptoms of the illness.
In addition, five smaller contractors and subcontractors at WIPP have each reported one case of COVID-19 among their WIPP workforces. “Please keep these employees and their families in your thoughts as they recover,” Dunagan wrote, reminding staff to wear face coverings and employ social distancing on the job.
About 1,000 people work at the underground disposal site for defense-related transuranic waste near Carlsbad, N.M.
The facility is currently in Phase 2 of the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s restart program to gradually ramp operations back up to pre-pandemic levels. Based on anecdotal information, facilities in Phase 2 can have at least 50% of their workforce on-site.
The Hanford Site in Washington state, which just entered Phase 2, reported two additional COVID-19 infections over the past week. That brings its total to at least 79, based on an informal count.
There have been two COVID-related deaths in the Environmental Management complex, one at the Savannah River Site and the other at DOE’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, during 2020.
Sites in Phase 2 are Hanford, the Idaho National Laboratory, the Nevada National Security Site, the Paducah Site in Kentucky, Portsmouth Site in Ohio, WIPP, West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, and the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Other sites are in Phase 1 and none has entered Phase 3 which entail nearly pre-COVID staffing inside the fence. The Uranium Mill Tailings Remediation Action (UMTRA) project in Moab, Utah is unique in that it never demobilized much.
As of Friday morning, the United States has recorded 6.15 million COVID-19 cases and almost 187,000 deaths, according to an online dashboard operated by John Hopkins University in Maryland.
Of states currently reporting COVID-19 infection rates of at least 15%, only Nevada is home to a significant Environmental Management location: the Nevada National Security Site.
States including Kentucky, Ohio, and New Mexico have issued travel restrictions for residents to traveling to other states considered hot spots, which are typically identified as having infection rates of at least 15%.
The states with such restrictions call upon those going to such a location to self-quarantine for 14 days upon their return. The other states listed on the Ohio travel advisory with the highest infection rates are Alabama (almost 33%), South Dakota (22%), North Dakota (20%), Iowa (18%), and Kansas (16%).
