March 17, 2014

URS EC WANTS TAMOSAITIS SUIT DISMISSED

By ExchangeMonitor

URS Energy and Construction is seeking to have a federal court dismiss a lawsuit filed by Walter Tamosaitis, a former contractor executive at the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant who has alleged he was removed from the WTP for raising safety concerns. In a motion for summary judgment filed late last week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District Court of Washington, URS EC claimed that Tamosaitis failed to fully exhaust available administrative remedies before filing his lawsuit. “Dr. Tamosaitis failed to comply with the ERA’s [Energy Reorganization Act of 1974] procedural requirements, and that failure deprives the Court of subject matter jurisdiction to consider this matter,” URS EC’s motion states.

Tamosaitis’ suit against URS EC, a major subcontractor at the WTP, is the last pending in his original legal struggle over his removal from the Hanford vit plant project. Tamosaitis, who previously served as the manager of research and technology at the WTP, has alleged he was removed from working on the project in the summer of 2010 for submitting a list of 50 open technical issues at the WTP shortly before his departure occurred and for sending an e-mail to consultants in an attempt to get them to question whether the issue of waste mixing at the plant had been sufficiently resolved before it was deemed closed. Both WTP project contractor Bechtel National and URS, for which Tamosaitis still works, have strongly denied his allegations. A suit Tamosaitis filed against Bechtel National in Washington state was dismissed, but is under appeal. Tamosaitis filed lawsuits against URS Corp. and the Department of Energy in federal court, but those have also been dismissed. A hearing has been scheduled on URS EC’s motion for September.

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