As of this week there have been a total of 175 confirmed cases of COVID-19 at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, Hanford Site Manager Brian Vance said Wednesday during a webcast advisory board meeting.
Vance, the Hanford site manager, provided the number in response to a question from a member of the Hanford Advisory Board: a DOE-chartered stakeholders group that provides community feedback about activity at the agency’s largest and most expensive nuclear-weapons cleanup site.
As of Wednesday morning, there had been 175 confirmed cases of COVID-19, 596 negative tests have been returned and site management is currently awaiting the results of 73 tests, Vance said.
Spokespersons with the DOE Office of Environmental Management have thus far declined to reveal specifics about the total number of infections at the former plutonium production site, aside from cases noted occasionally on a DOE Hanford advisory website which alerts the 11,000 federal and contract workers at Hanford about access to various facilities that are being disinfected to reduce risk of exposure to the virus.
When there are positive cases, DOE performs contact tracing “to the borders of the site and then we turn over to the counties,” of Benton and Franklin, Vance said. In response to a board question, Vance said contact tracing is important, and seemed to suggest contractors, who employ most people at the site, bear the chief responsibility for convincing workers to report potential COVID-19 exposures to health officials at Hanford. It is an issue to be taken up “with the employers,” Vance said.
Hanford, which is in Phase 2 of the DOE remobilization program to gradually return to pre-pandemic level operations, currently has about 60% of its people back onsite and another 40% teleworking. There are no longer any Hanford workers receiving paid leave because they could not telecommute or report back to their on-site work stations, Vance said. Hanford managers worked to ensure there all federal, contractor and subcontractor staffers fit into one of the two categories before fiscal 2020 ended Sept. 30.
The Department of Energy feared coronavirus-related paid leave for displaced contractor employees would expire at the end of the fiscal year. But as things turned out a continuing budget resolution kept the COVID-19 paid leave provision in place through Dec. 11.
