Members of the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board listen to presentations at their March 14 meeting at UNM-Los Alamos. Photo by Maire O’Neill/ladailypost.com
EM Los Alamos Field Office Manager Doug Hintze and NMED Manager for LANL Permitting Neelam Dhawan chat following the March 14 CAB meeting at UNM-LA. Photo by Maire O’Neill/ladailypost.com
By MAIRE O’NEILL
Los Alamos Daily Post
Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board members meeting March 14 in Los Alamos heard updates from Doug Hintze, manager of the Environmental Management Field Office and members of the N3B transition team.
Hintze once again spoke of the importance of a culture of safety in the Environmental Management program.
“We can talk all we want to here, but if you go to your house and like I do with my kids and my wife, complain about all the safety things that I do, that means that you’re living the safety. One of my pet peeves that I have here is parking lot safety. To really live safety, if you’re getting out of your car in the parking lot, weaving in and out of the cars in the parking lot. Do you stop at the end of the cars in the parking lot?” he asked.
“I’m used to the safety culture in my previous site. Every parking lot, you only went in in one direction and went out the other direction – that’s a safety culture. You had pedestrian pathways at each of the rows that went to the end and then you had to walk to the end until you had a crosswalk to get in. And it was lived, because if you did anything other than go down those pedestrian walkways, the folks there would politely ask you or remind you that you should be in that walkway. Around here I see cars parked in yellow or red parking areas. I have pet peeves, so I will say, safety is not number one if you don’t live it in your personal life.”
Hintze said his organization was created as part of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) Accident Investigation Board and that there were 40 judgments of needs, basically root causes that had to be corrected with a Correction Action Plan.
“There’s one remaining for us – that is staffing for my organization. We identified in order to provide adequate federal oversight, 33 positions. We’ve been struggling over the last couple of years because of funding and other issues. So now we just brought on two more folks, an industrial hygienist in quality assurance and we’re bringing on an environmental compliance specialist here in the next month, which will leave four more positions. The job’s not over. It just means we are adequately staffed to do the job,” Hintze said.
Hintze said he hates to talk about the budget but he loves to talk about the budget “because there’s always something in the budget because it’s never done the right way”.
“Here we are now just about half way through the year. The continuing resolution runs out here on March 23. The one thing I will tell you and I tell you every single time here, people say but you get the money and a lot of times you get the money based on what you got last year, and our last year’s (funding) and our request is pretty close,” he said. “That’s not the issue. The issue is when you get continuing resolutions, the way that we get the money is it’s allocated to us in small portions and there is no way we continue to do the work at a steady level.”
He said right now EM is looking at ramping down because of the March 23 expiration of the Continuing Resolution.
“We’ve shut down the government twice this year because of lapse of appropriations. That means we just don’t keep spending, we have to start shutting down work and that costs money to shut down work in addition to pulling the work back up again. March 23, your guess is as good as mine,” Hintze said. “As I say every time, when’s the last time we had an appropriation before the fiscal year starts? 1997! So that’s one of the things that folks are not aware of that impacts the ability for us to do the work.”
Speaking of the EM contract transition, Hintze said it is like when your 16-year-old gets a drivers license.
“Now he’s certified to be dangerous. The training wheels are off. There’s nobody sitting in the car with them. They’ve got it lock, stock and barrel,” he said.
“This contract transition is to see what the ‘as is’ is, so come April 29, April 30 these folks can take over and be safe. You’ve heard all the great things … the scope that’s going to be done. That’s over 10 years. And we would love to have all that scope done, we’d love to pay them 100 percent of the fee because that would mean they have exceeded our expectations. Our expectation right now is to be safe day one and implement their programs as they go along,” Hintze said.
With regard to the chromium project, he said during the last couple of weeks EM has been getting through the punch list items.
“We’re starting up the interim measures along the southern boundary (of the plume) next to San Ildefonso Pueblo. We started up the injection-extraction pumps down in that area. We’re going through testing and really the expectation is to finish that testing and not turn them off,” Hintze said. “Up near where Injection Well 6 was, that’s where we had the discussion on numerous occasions going out to many different stakeholder groups because different groups have different expectations on what they see from the sampling. Our discussion with New Mexico Environment Division is for more testing, more modeling and where we’re going to go with that area.”
Representatives of the N3B transition team updated the board on their progress and described their areas of responsibility, which include surface water monitoring and compliance; groundwater monitoring and compliance; consent order compliance; chromium plume interim and final remedy; completion of TA-21 clean-up; and material disposal and corrective measure evaluations and implementation plans.
The N3B president and program manager for the contract described the company’s structured transition process, which includes knowledge transfer, establishment of new IT infrastructure, stand-up of business systems, hiring of staff, interface agreements with LANL and readiness to proceed with full contract responsibility.
Fraser Lockhart, regulatory and stakeholder interface program manager explained the importance of his program and discussed how it was developed to meet the unique Los Alamos need. Business Services Program Manager Glenn Kizer told the board that LANS, the incumbent EM bridge contractor will be the most important source of employees for N3B. Some employees will be hired by subcontractors T2S or L&A and comparable benefits will be provided for all employees coming from LANS. He described extensive outreach efforts to inform employees of the transition process.
Kizer told the board that at least 35 percent of the clean-up contract dollars will be subcontracted and that subcontracting with small business partners will be a large component of their N3B’s success with the hope of awarding 65 percent of their subcontracted dollars to small businesses.
