Workers claim retaliation in Yucca Mountain water piping case
LAS VEGAS - Pipe fitters at Yucca Mountain say they were instructed
to damage the tunnel's main water line and install a pipe to bypass a state
water meter at the federal nuclear waste repository site.
The claims are made in a federal Labor Department whistle-blower case and in interviews with former contract workers at the site, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Monday.
Ronald Dollens of Pahrump said he was harassed before Yucca Mountain project contractor Bechtel SAIC fired him in May 2003 by for reporting what he claimed were violations of worker safety and Environmental Protection Agency laws including the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.
It was not clear whether the bypass was installed. A labor investigator has recommended that Bechtel SAIC pay Dollens $250,000 for retaliating after he complained.
Bechtel SAIC has appealed. No trial has been set before an administrative law judge.
"There was sabotage that went on. A pipe that went into the portal was purposely broke for overtime," Dollens told the Review-Journal.
Dollens said pipe fitters made a pipe in 2003 to reroute groundwater pumped from a nearby well around a state water meter.
In November 2003, Nevada State Engineer Hugh Ricci denied the Energy Department permanent rights to 140 million gallons per year of groundwater to build the repository to entomb the nation's most highly radioactive commercial and military waste.
But the state agreed in federal court to let Yucca Mountain project officials refill four water storage tanks for restroom facilities and emergencies.
In a statement Dollens filed with the Labor Department in his wrongful termination claim, he said foreman Mike Oettinger asked him and co-worker Dale Cain in November 2002 to purposely break a water line so they could get overtime pay fixing the pipe.
Dollens said the workers refused. But several days later, Oettinger was credited with working overtime to fix a broken pipe.
"I asked Mike Oettinger if he had broken the pipe, and he just laughed and said, 'Don't ask,'" Dollens stated in his affidavit. "Nothing ever happened for this pipe sabotage."
Oettinger, reached Friday at home in Amargosa Valley, declined comment.
A spokesman for Bechtel SAIC, Jason Bohne, also declined comment, citing ongoing litigation.
Cain said he was frustrated and doesn't stand to gain by confirming Dollens' story.
"I'd just like to see those people tell the truth for a change. There's nothing they can do to me," he told the Review-Journal.
Cain said Oettinger discussed a plan to bypass the water meter at the Nevada Test Site surrounding Yucca Mountain.
Cain and Dollens said they never saw the bypass pipeline installed.
"I observed the piece being made and delivered. Whether it got used, who knows?" Cain said.
Cain was laid off in December 2003.
In April 2004, Christopher Lee, deputy regional administrator for the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration in San Francisco, recommended Dollens get a $250,000 punitive award from Bechtel SAIC for "reckless conduct indifferent to the rights of the whistle-blower."
Lee wrote that he could not establish if water line sabotage, air conditioning tampering and theft of state water had occurred.
The investigation found Dollens was humiliated on March 23, 2003, for reporting an unsafe condition at the site's 1-million-gallon potable water tank, and confronted April 24, 2003, after protesting plans to open valves from old water tanks. He was fired the following month.
Dollens' lawyer, Sangeeta Singal, also represents three other former Yucca Mountain contract workers who claim they were fired by Bechtel SAIC because they refused to sign affidavits for the company in the Dollens case.
