Still sensitized from last July’s attention-grabbing break-in by peace activists, the Y-12 National Security Complex got another unwelcome visitor over the weekend. Security guards detained a 39-year-old Oak Ridge man who was allegedly riding his bicycle on a patrol road inside the nuclear installation on Saturday afternoon. The location wasn’t far from the site where the Plowshares protesters cut into a perimeter fence in the morning darkness of July 28, 2012. In this case, however, there apparently was no protest involved—although the intruder’s presence has not yet been explained.
Brent Lee, an Oak Ridge resident, was cited with a misdemeanor trespassing charge and released by the Oak Ridge Police Department. According to Steven Wyatt, a federal spokesman at Y-12, a canine security team on routine patrol spotted the man riding a bike on a patrol road on the north side of the government plant. The spokesman said the bike rider was traveling west to east on the patrol road, which is just inside the plant’s perimeter fence line on Pine Ridge. “The individual did not enter the high security area of the plant,” Wyatt said. As a precaution, Y-12 was placed in a “heightened state of security” on Saturday while guards and special search dogs swept the area to see if there were any other trespassers, Wyatt said. After no other intruders were found, normal operations resumed, he said. The roads and fences in the area have multiple signs warning against trespassing, and Y-12 security teams do frequent, random searches, Wyatt said. “The system worked,” he said.
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