The Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico said Monday it had evacuated its Building 954 and might do some deep cleaning there, after confirmed a case of COVID-19 among the workforce.
The lab was at deadline determining which employees at Building 954 had been in contact with the infected recently, according to Sandia’s website. The building is a central maintenance shop and supply warehouse that Sandia is keeping open to support essential personnel working on site, in spite of COVID-19. The building also includes a bicycle lab — closed because of the pandemic — run by a subcontractor that maintains a fleet of bicycles, and sells bikes to employees.
This is Sandia’s 10th reported confirmed case of COVID-19. The total includes people at both the Albuquerque and Livermore, Calif., locations.
Sandia on April 7 rolled out limited COVID-19 testing for its employees, contractors, and subcontractors.
The lab has previously evacuated, deep-cleaned, and reopened buildings within a day or two of confirming a COVID-19 case among the workforce in a specific location. Last week, Sandia completed that entire process for Building 860, the Environmental Test Lab, in about 24 hours.
Sandia is in the middle of New Mexico’s worst outbreak. Surrounding Bernalillo County had 455 confirmed cases, including 16 confirmed deaths, at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, according to a tracker maintained by the Johns Hopkins University. The county had more than one-third of New Mexico’s 1,245 confirmed cases, which includes 26 deaths.
Sandia and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California are surrounded by far worse outbreaks than the Los Alamos National Laboratory, also in northern New Mexico.
Editor’s note, April 15, 2020, 2:58 p.m. Eastern time. The story was corrected to explain why Building 954 was open during Sandia’s mission-essential posture, and to show that the COVID-19 case there was the lab’s 10th, and that the lab started limited COVID-19 testing for employees on April 7.
