O’Leary Questions 3 Layoffs Energy Chief Not Satisfied With Reasons Whistleblowers Lost Jobs

Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary apparently isn’t satisfied with management’s explanation of why three whistleblowers lost their jobs at the nuclear reservation.

After meeting with the workers and a dozen other whistleblowers Thursday in Richland, O’Leary said mediators should investigate why Sonja Anderson, Inez Austin and Gaidine Oglesbee recently lost their jobs.

She suggested convening the Hanford Joint Council, established in May 1994 to resolve whistleblower concerns.

The council includes representatives from Hanford contractors and several advocacy groups interested in whistleblower issues.

Westinghouse Hanford Co. welcomes O’Leary’s review, said company spokesman Craig Kuhlman.

“A review of the documents will determine these are personnel issues and not whistleblower issues,” Kuhlman said.

Austin and Oglesbee were employed by Westinghouse, and Anderson by ICF Kaiser Hanford Co.

They say they were ousted in retaliation for reporting safety problems and gathering sensitive documents for the Hanford downwinders’ lawsuit.

On Thursday, O’Leary told Hanford site manager John Wagoner to “draw a circle” around the women’s cases, said Tom Carpenter of the Government Accountability Project, a group that helps whistleblowers.

“She told (Wagoner) to be innovative and solve our problem,” said Austin, a former safety compliance officer at the tank farms, where millions of gallons of nuclear waste are stored.

Austin lost her job in March. Westinghouse says she left voluntarily, but she says she was fired after months of on-the-job harassment.

“Clearly, there’s a difference of opinion here about what happened,” Kuhlman said.

Austin won a whistleblower settlement with Westinghouse in 1991. That same year, she received the Playboy Foundation’s First Amendment award for her disclosures of safety problems in the tank farms.

Oglesbee, a safety compliance officer, said she was fired last week for what supervisors told her was “insubordinate, abusive conduct.”

She said the real reason she lost her job was for disclosing that Hanford documents have been destroyed and altered.

Oglesbee said she made the disclosures in response to a court-ordered request for information in a pending lawsuit brought by thousands of people who blame their health problems on radiation releases from Hanford.

Kuhlman denied her firing was connected to the downwinders’ lawsuit.

Anderson, a senior scientist, also was laid off last week. Her managers at ICF Kaiser Hanford Co. said she was simply a victim of the latest “downsizing.”

O’Leary introduced Jeffrey Crater, her newly-appointed whistleblower czar. He will help in the Hanford whistleblower reviews.

O’Leary also promised to speed up the resolution of older whistleblower cases.

“Whistleblowers at Hanford and around the Energy Department’s former nuclear weapons complex…need the assurance that our government will not allow their cases to linger,” she said.

While at Hanford, O’Leary also helped kick off construction of a building to temporarily store tons of spent nuclear fuel from Hanford’s weapons production days.

The fuel will be removed from the leaking and unstable K East Basins near the Columbia River by 1999 and will be stabilized by 2001 - four years ahead of schedule.

The project is re-using a facility started for the failed Hanford Waste Vitrification Plant, halted in March 1993.

Reusing that building’s base saves one year and cuts $17 million from the Canister Storage Building project, a DOE spokesman said.

, DataTimes