Until the recent past, the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico let its fire trucks fall into disrepair and did a poor job of training firefighters, the agency’s Office of Inspector General said in a just-released report.
While it found no evidence to substantiate the most serious allegations raised about the fire-fighting force at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, the DOE Office of Inspector General (IG) said the agency and its prime contractor dragged their feet when it came to fixing long standing problems with the WIPP fire department.
The IG found “significant and recurring issues pertaining to the Fire Department training program” for WIPP going back to at least 2016, including a vehicle fleet “in disrepair from years of neglected maintenance.”
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board previously documented concerns with the fire trucks in 2020.
The Office of Inspector General also found all of the WIPP firefighters it interviewed considered their training substandard, being too web-based without enough hands-on practice.
“The assessment team determined that nearly half of the firefighters had not participated in the required live fire training for at least 1 year, and some had not participated in over 2 years,” the Inspector General said in the report.
More vexing is that many shortcomings cited at WIPP had already been identified in prior internal reviews by DOE, the IG said.
The inspector general kicked off its investigation after a February 2021 complaint alleging that WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership made changes to the site’s Baseline Needs Assessment that would have resulted in unsafe firefighting standards, and that certain fire department training records were falsified. The subsequent investigation ran from May 2021 through December 2021 and discovered concerns raised about fire protection at WIPP dating to 2016.
In the end, the inspector general did not substantiate allegations about the Baseline Needs Assessment or the falsification of training records. With regard to hardware, however, IG said the DOE Office of Environmental Management confirmed in January 2021 that four vehicles — two fire trucks, a rescue truck, and an ambulance — were out of service due to being near retirement, or were awaiting repairs.
Those vehicles were temporarily replaced with leased vehicles. By May 2021, Nuclear Waste Partnership had purchased two replacement fire trucks for $1.2 million. This, the IG said, was an “appropriate action to address vehicle maintenance issues.”
In a letter attached to the IG report, Nicole Nelson-Jean, the Environmental Management office’s head of field operations, said the inspector general’s recommendations had been implemented.
