TOPICS

Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday's deadly train crash on Washington's Metro rail system did not disrupt the agency's daily operations.

NOAA headquarters is located in Silver Spring, Md. -- one train stop from the collision on Metro's Red Line which so far has killed at least nine people.

Some NOAA employees were traveling on the trains involved in the crash, but no major injuries to those workers were reported to the agency, according to officials. NOAA's main campus includes offices for the National Weather Service, National Ocean Service, Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, Satellite and Information Service, and the National Marine Fisheries Service. More than 4,000 employees work at the Silver Spring campus, and many of them commute via the Red Line.


RELATED STORIES

The Office of Personnel Management issued a memorandum on Tuesday encouraging federal agencies in the Washington region to accommodate the work schedules of employees whose commutes were affected by the deadly accident, allowing those eligible to telework and providing up to two hours of excused absence for others.

"The fact that we're a station or so away, obviously, it impacts many of our commuters," said Eduardo Ribas, NOAA's director for workforce management. "People are certainly talking about it; it's the shock and the awe."

On Monday evening, NOAA implemented a phone tree to track down its employees, according to Ribas. The procedure, instituted after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, instructs each manager to contact his or her direct reports, and to identify any employees affected by an accident or incident. The phone tree hasn't been completed yet, but NOAA officials said all workers have been accounted for.

Ribas said managers allowed employees to use unscheduled leave to deal with the disruption, and those with compressed schedules to reschedule their weekly day off for Tuesday. He said NOAA long has encouraged telework, and many employees were able to work from home on Tuesday.

Despite the availability of telework, some employees might not have had the necessary tools to work from home on Tuesday. "The challenge becomes less of a technology or allowance issue as, 'Do they have stuff with them that they can work a productive day?' Ribas said. "It happened at 5:05 p.m. yesterday afternoon. ... There are some people who were in their living rooms watching this unfold, and were expecting to come in today."

Chris Vaccaro, a spokesman for the National Weather Service, said the rail accident primarily caused longer or modified commutes for employees. "In terms of functionality of the entire office, and the campus, everything is at normal operations."

The Washington Metro Area Transit Authority advised commuters to avoid the Red Line altogether on Tuesday.

COMMENTS

  • It never ceases to amaze me how management can get so hung up over employees who would like to work at home (as in the case after this Metro accident Monday evening) but "don't have anything to work on since they didn't know about it prior." If you have a telework agreement with your agency, you should have computer access to your desktop and thus have the availability to get to any pending work. Managers also talk about having enough "productive" work for the day. What about those who come into the office, but don't have productive work for the day? Should they not get paid? What's the different between that and being at home looking for something to do? Everyone is not busy every moment of every day so I don't understand this mentality.
  • I retired from NOAA in 2007. I personally was very interested to find out if or how NOAA had been affected by the subway accident. Thanks for this story. I was also pleased to hear that the phone tree is working.
  • Although I live in California and am retired, this story is important to me as I still have many friends and colleagues at the NOAA comples in Silver Spring, and I am heartened that they are all OK. I had no other way of knowing. Thank you, GovExec!