Military officials are instructing employees at southern Indiana’s Naval Support Activity (NSA) Crane to practice social distancing and to work from home when possible.
NSA Crane is a sprawling navy installation that employs thousands of Hoosiers supporting U.S. military operations around the world.
It’s still open during the coronavirus outbreak but officials there say they’re taking precautions to protect workers and maintain military readiness.
“We have maximized our telework capability. We were very aggressive about it early on, when we saw that this might be an issue. I required 100 percent of my folks that could telework to receive the training and certification,” Army Col. Steve Dondero said Thursday. "I've got folks that have been doing that now for close to two weeks.”
Dondero supervises 751 civilian employees at the installation. He said most are still required to come in to work due to the nature of their jobs.
But many of them are also now working staggered shifts.
“That does a couple of different things. It alleviates pressure at the gates,” he said. "And it also allows our folks that may go into a common area to get a morning safety brief, or do their lunch break, or change their protective coveralls at the end of the day. They're not all in there at the same time. We've got smaller groups going through, and the rooms get cleaned in between and that way, we're sort of working the social distancing.”
Dondero says that protecting worker safety is key to maintaining military readiness.
“The question is, how do you maintain the readiness while focusing on our real top priority, which is keeping our people safe?” he said.
“What we've done is analyzed our total mission set, figured out which ones of those are absolutely critical to supporting the warfighter, and which one of those we couldn't reduce. We haven't eliminated anything right now. But we've reduced some of our operations so that we can focus on those critical ones. And in doing so, we've been able to limit the amount of people that we have coming physically coming into work.”
And he says no one at Crane has yet tested positive for COVID-19.
But he wants his employees to know that the facility is not only watching out for their health and safety at work. It will also back them up if they get sick.
Dondero says that if someone is diagnosed with COVID-19, they’ll be placed on a type of administrative leave that won’t negatively affect employment.
“There's no magic formula, and this is a unique situation. Even in my years in the Army, I've never come across something quite like this. But the basics serve us well. People and their wellbeing come first,” he said.
