PBS management attention is needed to protect building occupants and federal property. Image: JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffAn inspector general report has called GSA’s attention to what it called “a significant backlog of open fire, safety, and health risk conditions throughout GSA-managed assets,” which hold “a potential danger to persons in or around” those buildings.
In response to a hotline complaint, the IG assembled data from the Public Buildings Service showing a backlog of nearly 36,000 “actionable, open risk conditions” dating as far back as 2013. It gave as examples the lack of a fire sprinkler system in a building identified with a “high fire risk” in 2017; no corrective action to a 2019 finding of stones falling off a building’s façade causing a “potentially imminent danger to employees and the public”; a lack of required signage to obstructions in the way of fire exits; and the presence of hazardous materials.
Further, while regulations require that at least an abatement plan be issued within 30 days of a risk being identified, that deadline was not met in more than 5,000 cases—and where it was not met, the average time to put an abatement plan in place was three years. Examples included a seven-year wait regarding testing of fire dampers in one building, a six-year wait for a finding of signage needed to warn of fall hazards at another, and a more than a one-year wait for a plan to address an electrical hazard in a third.
“Taken together, the volume of open risk conditions indicates that PBS management attention is needed to protect building occupants and federal property, it said.
The report was the latest in a series from the IG and the GAO in recent months and years raising concerns in general, and about certain buildings in specific, about fire hazards, air quality, potentially contaminated water, and physical security controls in federal buildings.
In its response, the PBS said it acknowledges the open risk conditions and noted that it has closed some 57,600 over the last 26 years, but said its ability to address more has been hampered by money being diverted by Congress from the federal buildings fund that could be used for such work. “Where additional funding is not needed, we continue to work with our contractors and partners to address open risk conditions,” it said.
The PBS likewise said it acknowledges the timeliness issue “and continues to work to address it.”
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