FITNESS FOR DUTY – SUPERVISOR TESTED POSITIVE FOR ALCOHOL was today’s posting on the NRC Website for current event notifications.
A non-licensed employee supervisor had a confirmed positive for alcohol during a random fitness-for-duty test. The employee’s unescorted access to the plant has been revoked. Contact the Headquarters Operations Officer for additional details.
What is a non-licensed employee supervisor? Well, that means he was not one of the plant operators, but is a supervisor of another group, like engineering, maintenance, purchasing, or even health physics meaning dose measurement.
Not only is Vermont Yankee on a hiring freeze on orders from parent company Entergy, but the VT Legislature’s appointed oversight panel (VYOP) noted that staffing problems were endemic throughout the organization. In some departments 80% of the employees had been at VY less than three years, which according to VYOP is an indication of high turnover and inexperience.
Last spring, VY informed the Legislature that it would meet the VYOP recommendations, yet with an Entergy hiring freeze at a plant that already had staff shortages, how will that be possible? Now on top of failing cooling towers, equipment degradation and dose miscalculations we have supervisors arriving to work drunk.
NRC report and link below the fold.
Current Event Notification Report for September 1, 2009
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Operations Center
Event Reports For
08/31/2009 – 09/01/2009
FITNESS FOR DUTY – SUPERVISOR TESTED POSITIVE FOR ALCOHOLA non-licensed employee supervisor had a confirmed positive for alcohol during a random fitness-for-duty test. The employee’s unescorted access to the plant has been revoked. Contact the Headquarters Operations Officer for additional details.
The licensee has notified the NRC Resident Inspector.
FITNESS FOR DUTY – SUPERVISOR TESTED POSITIVE FOR ALCOHOLA non-licensed employee supervisor had a confirmed positive for alcohol during a random fitness-for-duty test. The employee’s unescorted access to the plant has been revoked. Contact the Headquarters Operations Officer for additional details.
The licensee has notified the NRC Resident Inspector.
Living in Essex, I know that there is a high degree of interest in keeping VY on-line in the future because of the electricity appetite of IBM — obviously not an insignificant issue. Yet, the on-going saga of Vermont Yankee troubles me greatly.
In their book Managing the Unexpected, Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe of the University of Michigan studied the performance of what they called HROs or highly reliable organizations. They used emergency rooms in hospitals, flight decks of aircraft carriers and firefighting units as examples of models to follow. One central tenet of their thesis: the ability of complex organizations to detect subtle clues indicating that something is awry.
They used the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Ohio as an example of where the failure to detect subtle clues nearly resulted in a potentially catastrophic reactor accident. Surely, Vermont Yankee has provided enough more-than-subtle clues that this is a troubled operation. I am sure VY’s flacks and apologists would argue, “Yes, but, we have continued to avoid a major adverse accident.” Even that, though, can provide little justification for confidence that VY will continue to dodge the disaster bullet. Another study of failure avoidance points to the “arrogrance of optimism”: Namely, we have been operating successfully for so long without an accident, we can fully expect this continue. Of course, the space shuttle disasters illustrate the folly of such an argument.
When the UMICH business profs used firefighters, emergency rooms and aircraft carriers as examples of HROs, we should keep in mind that failure in those settings would have consequences limited only to an individual or a few individuals. Failure in a nuclear power plant that seems to exhibit qualities of a not-so-reliable organization would have profound implications affecting potentially thousands of individuals or more. VY’s steady drip, drip, drip of problems is undeniable. To pooh-pooh this pattern is playing dice with the future of a good part of New England.
really well said, Mr. Post!
Apparently at Vermont Yankee you can show up to work drunk and not get fired.
snip
-Susan Smallheer, Rutland Herald
It seems that a VY you can get caught drunk at work even if your entire job is to enforce rules like ‘no being drunk at work’.. and keep your job.
I looked at the incident report and the time stamp was 9:44 AM. AM? This guy had beer on his Wheaties, or what?
Ok, just one opinion, but I’d think that someone who gets a snootful in the morning before work has a problem that cannot be solved with a couple of weeks of “employee assistance.”
Which brings to mind the thought that someone who gets nabbed in a random check for alcohol in the forenoon has perhaps been operating at unauthorized altitude for some time now. Without being noticed. Or, worse, noticed but ignored.
There’s a basic principle of Human Resources and being a bouncer in a bar. Success is not measured by how many yahoos you throw out, but how many you prevent from coming in. Seems like VY HR is failing on that one.