Even with the Department of Energy missing its groundwater sampling targets for 2020, officials with both the Washington state Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are satisfied with catchup efforts, officials said Friday.

“Under the circumstances, we think what USDOE doing is OK,” Washington Ecology spokesman Randy Bradbury said in an email, citing information from a state hydrologist. “They are going to miss only a small percentage of the samples and some of the samples,” due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

The Department of Energy is doing enough sampling to meet Resource Conservation and Recovery Act standards for the year, Bradbury said. The spokesman said DOE and its contractor crews are working 50 hours per week to try and make up for lost time. “We wouldn’t advise more than that.”

A spokesman for EPA Region 10 agreed. “While there was a reduction in the number of total samples collected this year (about 15% less), all samples critical to implementing or characterizing the site were collected,” EPA’s Mark MacIntyre said in an email.

Michael Cline, project director for soil and groundwater cleanup with DOE’s Richland Operations Office, told an online meeting of the Hanford Advisory Board Nov. 24 that the agency will likely miss 200-to-250 of its planned 2,500 groundwater samples for the year due to days lost to COVID-19. The samples are one means used by DOE to ensure that contamination from the former plutonium production complex is not reaching the Columbia River.

DOE is supposed to take a certain amount of samples each month, meaning the sample interval is more important to the data record than the raw number of samples pulled, DOE and Washington Ecology officials said. That means DOE can’t simply collect more samples to make up for the lumpiness in the data this year, the officials said.