Asleep On The Job: A Wakeup Call
(CBS)
There are not many good excuses for sleeping on the job. Even fewer if you happen to be a tactically-trained security guards; the first responders if a terrorist breaks into a nuclear facility. Public lives are quite literally in their hands.
Yet according to the security forces themselves, there is routine sleeping on the job at more than one of the nation's nuclear power plants.
The case of the napping guards at Peach Bottom nuclear plant in Pennsylvania is the topic of our story tonight on the CBS Evening News. It might have never amounted to a story at all, but for a tenacious guard who, after being rebuffed by his own supervisors and feeling rebuffed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that's supposed to care, recorded his fellow sleeping guards over a period of months.
If not for the video evidence ... the video embarrassment ... the NRC, the plant's owner and the security company, Wackenhut, would likely have all just written off the claims as unsubstantiated. After all, according to three sources we spoke to, sleeping is part of an accepted culture at Wackenhut: nobody is really looking to catch anyone in the act.
