As workers at the Blue Grass plant continue and complete closure activities, one group is chronicling every step of the progress.
“Document control staff are the unsung heroes,” said Whitney Wells, document control specialist, Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass, or BPBG. “It’s not just paperwork, it’s critical to the mission.”
“The job is not done until the paperwork is done, recorded and documented,” said Maxine Powell, Office and Administrative Services project manager, BPBG. “We were there at the beginning and we’ll be there at the very end.”
The 13-member Document Control team covers the Safety, Maintenance and Industrial Hygiene departments, handling everything from medical records, permits and radio traffic to inventory, invoices and payments. On average, they process 6,000 documents a month, Powell said.
The group oversees material dating back to the earliest days of the Blue Grass Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant, or BGCAPP, project and will do its job until the day the keys are handed over to the Blue Grass Army Depot. At the end of July, the team had 1,468,625 documents containing hundreds of millions of pages in its electronic document control system, Powell said.
“These documents are vitally important, telling the project’s history,” said Devon Campbell, deputy Office and Administrative Services project manager, BPBG. “Whether it’s curiosity or an environmental question, years from now, these records will have the answers.”
Even during closure, the importance of the destruction of the last chemical weapons in the nation’s stockpile demands everything at BGCAPP be documented. Forms and procedures outline even the smallest scope of work, and the workers involved review, study, discuss, sign, and report every action along the way.
“The biggest change has been the technology, the shift from paper to electronic media, from printing out large building plans and taking them to people in the field to making and storing them digitally so they can be reviewed anywhere in an instant on an electronic device,” said Campbell.
“It happens every week, someone will walk in and ask for something from years ago and we have to be able to find it and do it quickly,” said Christina Clark, document control lead, BPBG. “Technology has changed storage and delivery, but it still must be done right. We take pride in that.”
That means not only filing it under the correct and often multiple categories but also knowing which documents, such as invoices and inventory items, must be kept in both paper copy and digitally and for how long according to the Records and Retention Schedule, Powell said.
The sometimes complicated and painstaking parts of the work keep Wells, who has been on the team almost 14 years, engaged in what she does.
“People’s appreciation for what we do changes over time,” said Wells. “For me, the greatest gratification comes in knowing my 18-year-old son understands the importance of what I do.”
