ORLANDO - NAVSEA’s
Naval Ordnance Safety & Security Activity (NOSSA) is now upgrading and
expanding strategic munitions facilities around the world to reduce sail times
to safe havens for Navy vessels and to provide warfighters with additional
options for reloading ordnance and repairing ships.
The effort,
known as Explosive Safety Siting, is just one topic being discussed among Navy, Marine
Corps, Army and Air Force ordnance experts who met this week at the 2015 Dept.
of the Navy Explosives Safety Workshop in Orlando, Florida, to improve
explosives safety management programs.
“We do a
comparative analysis of our potential site, wherever the host nation may be, to
see whose policy is more stringent,” said Mark Mentikov, explosive safety
officer, U.S. Pacific Fleet. “If a
partner nation has an explosive safety policy that is equal to or greater than
the DoD’s, then we consider them acceptable to use while our forces are
deployed to that nation.”
NOSSA, a
field activity of the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), hosted the workshop
to maintain a focus on explosive safety issues that includes new facility
planning and certifications, shipboard compliance, foreign material
acquisition, new technologies, policy reviews, environmental impact, training
and an incident review.
“Success is
great, especially when risk is involved, but we have to stay fully engaged at
all times with the Fleet,” said keynote speaker Rear Adm. Tom Kearney, deputy
commander, Naval Sea Systems Command Acquisition, Commonality and Expeditionary
Warfare. “It’s our job to articulate
those risks, from a safety perspective, to help the Fleet have full
realizations of potential risks associated with all weapon platforms.”
NOSSA is
responsible for protecting Naval interests and the public by providing
explosive and ordnance safety expertise, technical policies and procedures and
oversight across the Navy.
“When you
don’t have an incident, we’re doing our job; when nothing happens, it’s because
our team did our job to ensure that there wasn’t an incident,” said Capt. Todd
Siddall, NOSSA commanding officer. “Every system that goes through NAVSEA; we
touch almost every single program before it goes out to the Fleet; we’re
uniquely positioned for that; we follow nearly all weapons systems from the
acquisition phase to the transportation and storage of ordnance to the
placement and safe deployment and then, in some cases, the disposal of
them.”
In addition
to safety assurance from conception to disposal, NOSSA also serves as the
technical authority for environmentally related ordnance concerns for the
Navy. This includes performing site
visits to ensure Navy facilities have proper permits; validating commands are
properly managing waste materials, and providing ordnance environmental
compliance training.
“What a lot
of people don’t know is that NOSSA is the only organization within the DoD that
has integrated our explosives safety site visits with our environmental
compliance reviews,” said Sherry McCahill, a NOSSA senior environmental
engineer. “When we inspect a facility
from an explosives safety perspective, we make it a point to look at their
explosive hazardous waste; things like their treatment facilities, to make sure
they’re operating within their Federal and state environmental permits. It’s obviously important that our sites
comply with all of the rules, but we really want to be a good steward of a
healthy environment.”
NOSSA, as the
Navy’s cadre of ordnance environmental technical experts, provides the guidance
to its customers to ensure they understand and comply with policy and criteria,
but responsibility for enforcement or any cleanup falls to the Naval Facilities
Engineering Command.
“We’re more
than just overseeing and assuring. We’re
the technical experts. It’s our mission
to oversee them, but provide technical support through training ensures they
maintain compliance,” said McCahill.
The three-day
conference is a bi-annual event, but Siddall emphasized the importance of
coming together and how it affects their mission.
“We do this on a daily basis [work on explosives
safety issues], but an event like this one is instrumental because the
face-to-face and group interaction leads us to a better process to the
future. A ship without weapons is just a
cruise ship.”