Jan. 26, 2005

West parking garage lightning protection

Clair Sullivan's letter on the west parking garage about the top deck misses another safety issue that appeared when the garage opened. They removed the pedestrian shelter at the park-and-ride lot at Technical Area 3 because it was metal and did not have proper lightning protection. The concern was that the people huddled under the shelter would be vulnerable lightning. No consideration was apparently given to the several lightning strikes each year to clusters of people out in the open, such as football huddles and golfers.

They built a very nice semi-enclosed bus shelter as part of the west parking garage and it has no lightning protection. Well, I suppose that's ok, as it is in the protection shadow of the four-story garage. But the new parking garage [near the SM30 warehouse] also has no lightning protection. None. If you are on the top floor of the garage during a summer thunderstorm you will be at much greater risk than you would ever have been in the shelter at the park-and-ride lot. When facilities was asked about the absence of lightning protection, their response was (paraphrasing now), that the Department of Energy construction standards did not require that the building be protected because it was cheaper to replace it than to protect it. When we raised the question of personnel safety on the upper deck, it was ignored.

So there you have it; the park-and-ride shelter was removed because it didn't have lightning rods and presented a potential hazard to the occupants. Then two new structures were built with lightning rods deliberately not installed because the DOE regulations did not specifically require them. Is providing lightning protection an unallowable expense in the DOE contract?

--David W. Thomson