FIRST PROJECT

Downtown Carlsbad site of $5M facility

A ceremony marked the new WIPP emergency center in Carlsbad, the first project paid for with money from a settlement with the Department of Energy.

Officials inaugurated a new emergency operations center in Carlsbad on Thursday, the first project to be completed with money from a settlement paid by the Energy Department to resolve state permit violations at LANL and WIPP.

The $5 million emergency operations center in downtown Carlsbad will serve as an offsite space to help manage any emergency that could unfold at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant about 26 miles outside town.

Gov. Susana Martinez attended the ribbon-cutting Thursday.

The 4,000-square-foot facility provides an emergency management support area, contingency rooms, new computers, wall-mounted monitors and interactive message boards. WIPP will run it but local authorities can use it, too.

“Technically it’s a DOE facility but if we can assist in another kind of response outside of WIPP, it is available to state and local agencies,” said Bill Taylor, spokesman for DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office.

A fire underground on a salt haul truck in February 2014 shut down WIPP. Nine days later, a hot reaction inside a drum of nuclear waste — improperly packaged at Los Alamos National Laboratory — broke the drum’s lid and released radiation into the underground.

The New Mexico Environment Department in January finalized an agreement with DOE in which the federal government agreed to pay for infrastructure projects worth $74 million around Los Alamos and Carlsbad.

The deal covered about $54 million in civil fines levied by NMED for dozens of permit violations at WIPP and LANL in connection with the radiation incident, as well as resolving potential future fines stemming from the accident.

WIPP, mined from a deep underground salt formation, is the final resting place for certain types of defense nuclear waste.