By Katie Pawlosky, NBAF Communications Director
November 2021
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, or NBAF, has several ambitious goals. Of course, when the facility has been tasked to protect agriculture, attract quality employees and keep everyone safe in the process, those goals should be set to a high standard.
The first goal — which actually is tasked to our partners at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, or DHS S&T — is literally creating a solid and firm foundation for this state-of-the-art facility by building it from the ground up. As a result of COVID-19 disruptions, USDA and DHS continue collaborating to realign NBAF’s schedule to minimize the effects of the pandemic and delays to the overall program.
As part of that realignment last year, USDA and DHS announced they would address necessary technology upgrades identified since the design was completed in 2012 as well as installation of USDA-funded equipment as part of the construction timeline. While it was clear these efforts were going to be significant, they are taking more time than expected, and DHS S&T is currently estimating that construction will be complete in spring 2022.
DHS S&T is also responsible for NBAF’s commissioning, which is another way to say a performance review for the building and its systems. The testing and retesting of NBAF’s unique and complex building systems is linked to the completion of construction and is also taking a bit longer than anticipated, so the commissioning completion date is estimated for summer 2022.
At NBAF, employees at both U.S. departments are participating in commissioning alongside the contractor so that everyone is on the same page about the facility’s innerworkings and unique abilities. This meticulous and important process has revealed the team’s dedication.
As USDA NBAF Coordinator Dr. Ken Burton said, “The critical nature of NBAF’s systems requires that they work together flawlessly to maintain the level of safety needed at NBAF. These are things we can’t rush, and we won’t rush, so the timeline has been adjusted to reflect that.”
Before the pandemic, DHS was going to operate the facility until construction and commissioning were complete. But in another effort to mitigate the pandemic’s effects, the two departments agreed to a phased transition, where USDA employees would start taking over operations of the facility one piece at a time — before the construction and commissioning milestones are complete.
With this phased transition, NBAF employees’ goal is to learn about and skillfully operate a $1.25 billion, high-tech facility before any science can transfer from the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Currently, USDA employees are operating the transshipping building, central utility and wastewater pre-treatment plants, managing operations and maintenance for the campus and overseeing the security guard services.
According to Anthony Rodriguez, NBAF’s chief of safety, health and environmental management, or SHEM, NBAF employees have to make sure they are comfortable operating NBAF efficiently. They also need to make sure the facility complies with basic standards — such as those from Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Kansas Department of Health and Environment. In addition, the facility needs to have a solid life safety program in place before any science can be performed inside the secure walls.
The SHEM team is working hard to approach this from a customer service perspective and will provide programs to reduce risk of injury as well as respond to potential emergencies with CPR and AED programs and equipment. In fact, the team is in the process of standing up its own Occupational Health Clinic on NBAF’s campus, where job-related examinations and first aid can be administered.
A third goal is more of a long-range one but many NBAF employees are striving to make their area of the facility and its programs the professional standard that other facilities can look to and model.
“Once we have the basic program established, we can start creating facets that we hope will become best practices within our professional community,” Rodriguez said.
He’s not alone! Our quality assurance manager, biorisk training manager and many others (including NBAF’s communications team) are committed to similar goals — to set the precedent and be the example that other facilities want to follow. We set our goals so high that we hope to land among the stars, or as the Kansas motto says, Ad Astra Per Aspera: to the stars through difficulties.
The pandemic has presented some challenges and played a leading role in the delays to NBAF’s timeline. Despite those, we have hired more than 170 employees during the pandemic, about a quarter of which moved to Kansas for their current positions with NBAF. With these new Kansans, and as we continue to share information about this area with Plum Island scientists who are helping us stand up this facility, we are pleased that so many of our coworkers share the same determination, work ethic and high aspirations that are frequently seen in Kansans.