An updated emergency management plan would be one step toward improving readiness for a crisis at a former Department of Energy uranium enrichment site in Tennessee, accordng to a DOE Office of Enterprise Assessments report released this week.The department generally gave good marks to emergency management operations at the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP), which is now undergoing environmental rehabilitation, decontamination, facility decommissioning, and legacy waste management while being reindustrialized for private use.“Overall, the technical planning basis for ETTP, which forms the foundation of the emergency management program, is sound. Onsite protective actions and offsite protective action recommendations are adequate to protect the health and safety of the onsite and offsite populations,” the report says. “Emergency plan implementing procedures provide necessary details for effectively executing the response to an Operational Emergency.”
However, DOE also cited key areas “of emergency management weakness” by site contract operator URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR) and the DOE Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM). Among them, UCOR has not instituted annual updates to the plan since assuming management of the site in August 2011, though a revised document is expected by the end of September. In the interim, the existing emergency management plan does not accurately represent the status of some facilities and fails to include “severe event considerations,” among other issues, DOE said.
The report also notes that emergency drills have not been expanded to encompass additional crisis situations, hazards, and facilities at ETTP. That means crisis response personnel do not train in dealing with emergencies at all structures in which hazardous materials releases could occur. Finally, the report cites a number of problems involving DOE and OREM assessments of emergency management operations at the site, including instances in which fixes for issues cited in the reports failed to resolve the situation or ensure it would not happen again.