COVID-19 has made remote work much more common for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, and could alter work practices even after the pandemic recedes, the office’s top career official said Tuesday.
Even with some people return to cleanup sites across the country, at EM headquarters in Washington, D.C., there is still only “a handful of people in on a given day,” Todd Shrader, DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental manager, told the audience at an online conference sponsored by the Tennessee-based Energy Technology & Environmental Business Association.
“We communicate like this,” using various video platforms, Shrader said.
Shrader said, going forward, the agency will re-examine the need for large office buildings and having large clusters of employees live within the same city.
Aside from office work, the DOE cleanup branch is continuing to bring back on-site staff at the 16 Cold War remediation sites, Shrader said. The agency is “bringing them back as conditions allow,” he said.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management resorted to bare bones staffing for about two months, between mid-March and late May, while considering how it would continue to get work done during a pandemic.
Most Environmental Management offices are in Phase 2 of the DOE start program designed to return work to pre-COVID-19 levels. Phase 2 is generally when employees are brought back in larger numbers to do jobs that require more personal protective equipment. The DOE is “bringing them back as conditions allow,” Shrader said.
No sites have yet to attain Phase 3, which would mark a return to virtual pre-coronavirus operational levels.
A key metric considered by the Office of Environmental Management is the number of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population over a two-week period. This helps account the number of virus infections in large and small counties, Shrader said. An infection rate over more than 200 per 100,000 people over two weeks is considered troublesome, he said.
