CDM late last week won a sole-source contract worth approximately $11.3 million to continue to aid the Department of Energy in preparing to tackle the cleanup of the Energy Technology Engineering Center (ETEC) site. Under the contract, set to run for three years, CDM will continue with sampling efforts and work to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for the cleanup of ETEC, located at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in California. The task order, awarded under DOE’s set of national Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity cleanup contracts, is a follow-on to one awarded to CDM in 2008.
Among the reasons DOE chose to keep CDM on at ETEC rather than put the new contract out is the need for “timely completion” of the EIS, according to a Department justification document. “It … would be reasonable for any new contractor taking over responsibility for the EIS, to as a minimum, review all work that has been performed to date as well as all supporting surveys, studies, and analyses. This effort could easily take months to complete, thereby adding delays that would threaten the project’s ability to meet its 2017 clean up date,” the document says. “Of far more impact, a new contractor would be more likely to elect to restart the EIS from scratch to confirm the accuracy of previously collected data, rather than qualify its own work product by noting that its conclusions are predicated on data for which it is not responsible. In either case, the EIS would likely be delayed and more expensive, adding up to a year to the existing schedule.”
DOE also cited the knowledge CDM already has of the ETEC site. “SSFL is a complex, highly controversial site with extensive stakeholder, regulator, and congressional interest and interactions. The unique interactions, extensive past history, interactions of two federal agencies (NASA and DOE) and a commercial entity (Boeing) as responsible parties compound the complexity of this site,“ the justification document says, adding, “If a contractor other than CDM were to take on the current contract requirements at ETEC, that contractor would have to develop the same level of knowledge and expertise regarding the individual facilities, interactions with U.S. EPA, extensive past sampling activities, and release sites (places where there were chemical or radiological releases on site) that CDM possesses.”