Security & Emergency Services

The Security and Emergency Services Division (SES) supports the Lab’s mission by protecting the Lab’s assets and its people. The mission of the Division is to support scientific advancement through the promotion of the Lab’s protection, preparedness, and resiliency capabilities while leading response efforts that safeguard the Lab and our community. The division works in partnership with research areas and other Operations divisions as a valued partner.

The Division provides a number of services to the Lab. These include facilitating site access to include visitor management, badging, managing locks, keys, and building access, monitoring site safety and security through our 24/7 site operations center, inspecting facilities and partnering with on-going Lab project teams to ensure fire code compliance, coordinating lab-wide responses to emergencies, and acting as a liaison and Lab advocate with first responder community.

How does SES support the Lab’s mission?

In order to bring science solutions to the world, we need to keep our people and physical assets, to include our facilities, safe and secure. We also need to ensure we are prepared to respond in the event an incident occurs that impacts our mission while helping the lab recover as quickly and safely as possible in order to continue that mission.

What are SES’s current top 3 or 4 priorities?

SES activities focus on maintaining operations, preparedness, and response activities while meeting DOE compliance mandates for those activities. Right now, a major focus area is increasing our security measures across the site in order to protect some of our higher risk materials and facilities. This is important because as a federally funded research and development center, we are required to safeguard and be good stewards of our facilities, assets, and resources to standards required under our contract. We are also focussed on emergency preparedness, particularly in response to local challenges presented by wildfire hazards and local utility planned power shutoffs.

Who do you partner with at the Lab to be successful?

We can not be successful without any of our research and operations partners. It is really a team effort. We rely on the Lab community to be aware of their safety and security responsibilities and also to let us know if they see something that is of concern so we can look into it. When it comes to emergency response, we work hand in hand with Division Safety Coordinators, Building Managers, research operations staff, and many others to appropriately respond and get research back on track.

Who from the past, present, or future would you like to job shadow you? And why?

I will flp this around a bit and say that I would like to job-shadow a principal investigator to have a better understanding of the complete lifecycle of research projects and what a “day in the life” looks like. I think that would be both fascinating and educational.