By Lindsay Wise & Sammy Fretwell / McClatchy Washington Bureau | TNS
WASHINGTON—In her job at the Savannah River Site nuclear-weapons plant in South Carolina, Sandra Black was responsible for looking into concerns raised by employees about everything, from health and safety to fraud, abuse, harassment and retaliation.
But in fall 2014, when federal investigators with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) asked her whether she had the necessary independence to do her job, Black says she answered truthfully: She told them her supervisors had interfered with her work and had tried to intimidate her into changing her findings if they validated employees’ complaints.
Black disclosed her conversation with the GAO investigators to her bosses. A few weeks later, on January 7, 2015, she was fired.
“It is so humiliating and embarrassing,” Black said. “It’s hard to come home and tell your family you’ve been terminated after 35 years. It was for no reason other than retaliation for doing my job correctly
with integrity.”
The investigators who questioned Black had been conducting a probe into whistle-blower retaliation by the Department of Energy and its contractors at the nation’s nuclear facilities. The GAO is expected to release a report this spring.
Three US senators—Democrats Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Edward Markey of Massachusetts—had asked the GAO in March 2014 to get to the bottom of persistent incidents of retaliation against whistle-blowers reported at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state.
The probe broadened to review other DOE sites, including SRS near Aiken, South Carolina.
“It defies belief that an Energy Department contractor would fire an employee who cooperated with a Government Accountability Office investigation into whistle-blower retaliation,” said Wyden, a former chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
“I’m awaiting the GAO’s full report,” Wyden said, “but the firing of Sandra Black under these circumstances demonstrates to me that the culture of retaliation against whistle-blowers is regrettably alive and well at DOE.”
Dangerous culture
MARKEY said Black’s termination is evidence of a “dangerous culture of disregard for the law” among DOE contractors, including Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the company Black says let her go.
“Rather than rewarding whistleblowers who bravely put their careers on the line to protect public safety, SRNS and other contractors have acted to retaliate against them, sending a chilling message to all employees who bear witness to wasteful, unsafe or illegal activity,” Markey said. “DOE has historically done nothing to curb this wholly unacceptable behavior.”
McCaskill said she’s “deeply troubled by the retaliation against whistleblowers I’ve seen at the Department of Energy and its contractors.”
While she couldn’t comment on a specific ongoing case, McCaskill stressed she plans to continue addressing the problem of retaliation, which she said is “unacceptable.”
In 1992 Congress passed legislation strengthening protections for DOE contractor employees. Since then, the DOE’s of Hearings and Appeals has decided 116 cases related to whistleblower retaliation at nuclear facilities, according to McClatchy’s review of case files. In 46 of these cases, the whistle-blower had raised safety concerns.
This internal mechanism for addressing whistle-blower retaliation hears the most cases from Savannah River and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, both with 16 cases, followed by Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico with 15.
Whistle-blower retaliation
ACCORDING to data from the Project on Government Oversight, instances of whistle-blower retaliation have only resulted in fines or settlements seven times. Six of these judgments were against contractors at the Hanford Site.
The DOE and SRNS declined to comment on the Black case, but said they encourage employees
to speak out.
“The Department of Energy is committed to promoting a strong safety culture and a workplace where federal and contractor employees alike are able to speak out, raise issues, or share concerns about safety without fear of retaliation,” the agency said in a statement to McClatchy. “DOE expects both its leaders and its contractors to demonstrate a commitment to safety through decisions reflecting safety as the priority.”
Hanford is a 586-square-mile weapons complex near the Columbia River in Washington that, like many DOE sites, is a source of community pride. It was a cornerstone of the government’s Cold War effort to produce nuclear weapons.
But some workers—and worker advocates—say Hanford has a problem. Its management doesn’t like whistleblowers, said Tom Carpenter, director at Hanford Challenge, a regional public interest group in Seattle.
“The pattern of reprisal at Hanford is historical, well-documented and has gotten progressively worse,” according to a March 2014 report he made to the US Senate.
Last year Hanford contractor URS agreed to settle a lawsuit by a former employee for $4.1 million in what Carpenter said is one of the biggest public verdicts at the site. The whistle-blower case involved questions about the future safe operation of a waste-vitrification plant. It was among a number of retaliation cases involving workers who tried to blow the whistle on problems at Hanford, Carpenter said.
Kirt Clem and Matt Spencer say they are among those who have suffered retaliation.
Exposure risk
CLEM and Spencer were employees with Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) at Hanford in 2012, when they reported a defect in an electronic medical records system that made mistakes tracking employees’ medical restrictions. As a result, employees who shouldn’t work in areas where beryllium and other hazardous materials were present risked being exposed.
People who are sensitive to beryllium risk developing chronic beryllium disease, a serious respiratory condition that can be fatal.
Clem and Spencer were laid off after raising their concerns with the DOE’s Employee Concerns office and their own managers. The director of Computer Sciences Corp. admitted in a recorded interview that their warnings about the faulty medical records system played a part in her decision to suspend them.