Nuclear facilitiesGuard fired for Y-12 breach says he was made a scapegoat for contractor’s failings

Kirk Garland, a security guard at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was fired from his job two weeks after three aging peace activists, led by an 82-year old nun, managed, on 28 July 2012, to breach the facility’s supposedly impregnable perimeter security systems, then loiter, unnoticed, on the grounds of the facility, where bomb grade uranium is stored. The activists had enough time to spray-paint peace messages and Bible verses on walls, slosh the walls with human blood, and wrap one of the buildings with crime-scene tape.

Eventually Garland noticed the intruders and called the police to have them arrested.

Garland was initially praised by his superiors at Wackenhut Services, then the security contractor at Y-12, for what the contractor said was his professional handling of the intrusion. Two weeks later, though, after investigating the incident, Wackenhut fired Garland for being too lax and casual in his handling of the intruders.

Critics said that if the intruders had been a diversion for armed terrorists, Y-12 could have been under serious attack.

Wackenhut’s contract at Y-12 was terminated in the wake of the intrusion.

According to the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Garland noted that by the time he was called to the scene, the intruders had already caused damage to the plant. Garland believes he was fired because his employers hoped that taking some sort of action would divert attention from larger issues with the plant’s security, which included outdated cameras and detectors which did not work properly on the day of the intrusion. If Wackenhut had not fired a number of security police officers in the months leading to the break-in, the intruders would have been detained by security patrols before they got close to the Y-12 facility, Garland said.

With thirty years of experience working at federal nuclear weapons facilities, Garland insists he knew how to handle intrusions and his actions were appropriate. Today Garland is a security guard at Morgan County Correctional Facility, making an annual salary of $28,000 compared to his former base salary of $85,000 at Y-12.

Last month Garland returned to Y-12 for a six-hour arbitration hearing where he defended his actions as the first guard on site during the largest security breach in the plant’s history. Garland believes he was made a scapegoat and he is hoping to receive a financial settlement that will include back pay for the time he was fired.

“Like I told the arbitrator … we can sit here and you can scrutinize me all you want, but at the end of the day I stopped their actions, I detained them, I called for backup, we arrested them, I testified against them and they’re in prison. How much more picture perfect can it be than that? And I went home to my family, and nobody got killed and nobody got hurt,” Garland said.