Report: Oak Ridge guards get more overtime, less training
KNOXVILLE — Security guards responsible for defending the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant routinely work more than 60 hours a week but still aren’t putting in enough time on training, federal auditors said in a report Tuesday.
The 650-guard force at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant spent “about 40 percent less time on combat readiness training” than required, some officers received credits for more training time than they received and in at least four cases signatures were falsified on training attendance rolls, the Energy Department’s inspector general office said.
Moreover, guards regularly working more than 60 hours a week contradicted DOE’s own protective force program manual recommendations for “safe operations,” the inspector general said.
The report even said “some protective force personnel cited excessive overtime as a reason for not completing required physical fitness training.”
Peter Stockton, a senior investigator for the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C., called the conclusions “devastating” for a nuclear weapons installation that has been accused of cheating on security exercises and other lapses.
But DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nuclear weapons program, suggested the inspector general’s overtime concerns were overstated and that Oak Ridge security contractor Wackenhut Services Inc. was following “widely accepted industry practice” on training.
NNSA’s chief concern was for “signing for and being paid for physical training that was not performed. (That) is a serious matter and has been turned over to the IG’s investigative branch for further investigation,” NNSA Y-12 spokesman Steven Wyatt said.
Wackenhut-Oak Ridge chief Jean Burleson said the study failed to measure the quality of the training or review the classified results of a just completed 2 1/2-month internal exercise in which guards passed 207 individual tests designed to measure current performance and improvements from past deficiencies.
The tests included weapons qualification, physical training, security officer knowledge and tactical planning, plus four force-on-force exercises — “the whole gamut of what we are required to do training wise,” Burleson said.
NNSA was “very pleased with the outcome of the (classified) assessment,” Wyatt said. “(While) we are awaiting a final report, the assessment clearly demonstrates that we are making dramatic improvements in security at Y-12.”
As for the inspector general’s report, Wyatt said, “It is clear to us that the IG did not take into consideration the methodology used by” Wackenhut for scheduled training.
“The issue is training to time or training to standard,” Burleson said. “We train to standard.”
If a veteran guard demonstrates proficiency with a weapon in one hour, there’s no reason to keep him there for a scheduled three-hour training session, Burleson said, explaining how Wackenhut shaved training time.
“This is a widely accepted industry practice and is specifically authorized in DOE orders,” Wyatt said.
Since 2000, Wackenhut has cut overtime in half but the hours have gone up and down when stepped-up security efforts change in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Burleson said.
Stockton said the problem is a lack of manpower. Burleson said Wackenhut is trying to hire more guards but noted that getting them into key positions can be delayed 17 to 20 months until they receive security clearance.
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Y-12 nuclear weapons plant: http://www.y12.doe.gov/bwxt/y12.html