Welcome Back from the Chief Hydrologist Date: Mon, 20 Nov 1995 13:16:47 GMT To: "E - All WRD Employees" From: "Robert M Hirsch, Chief Hydrologist, Reston, VA" (Robert M. Hirsch) Subject: Welcome Back Cc: geaton@usgs.gov, bmcgrego@usgs.gov, bjryan@usgs.gov, pleahy@usgs.gov, rwitmer@usgs.gov, wgossman@usgs.gov, lstanley@usgs.gov Welcome back to work. I know that this has been a difficult week for all of you. I would like to make a couple of brief comments on the shut-down. As we think about the shut-down and discuss it with our colleagues, customers, friends, and fellow citizens we need to put the concept of "essential employees" in the proper perspective. The Water Resources Division (WRD) provides information to the Nation on two time scales. The first of these is time-critical data needed to manage the water resources of the Nation on an hourly or daily basis. Some of these data are also used to protect human lives from flood hazards. The second type of information is less time-critical. It is the information that allows the Nation to understand its water resources, how they have changed over time, and how they would change in the future in response to specific human actions. Timeliness of this information is important because it forms the basis for many decisions. However, delays of a few days or weeks do not present a threat to public health and safety. The Administration determined that the only employees that could continue to work in the absence of appropriations were those critical to the first function (the time-critical data). The fact that this time-critical data function can operate virtually unattended for several days at a time is a credit to the innovation and attention to quality and reliability that typifies our data section employees. This allowed us to function with only 70 "essential employees." Most of these were the District Chiefs. We chose them because we needed people who could respond to concerned data users and funding agencies and make the necessary judgments of when to augment our staffs to attend to serious threats to public safety due to floods or equipment failures. At first blush this may have suggested that only about two percent of our staff are essential. To the contrary, it says to me we have excellent systems that will work unattended for periods of a few days but that in the event of a natural disaster our essential staff is nearly our entire staff. We must remind those who would question the need for the other 98 percent of our staff of two facts. First, it is because of the vigilant attention of a dedicated staff that our systems will work for a few days or weeks without hands-on attention. But these same systems would rapidly degrade if not monitored by this staff for periods of weeks or months. Second, our mission is not limited to the provision of time-critical information. Many employees are needed to provide information of lasting value which is not time-critical. As you return to your jobs, which have now been made more difficult by the backlog of tasks not completed during the furlough, I want to remind you of your responsibilities and rights as federal employees. You may be personally very frustrated and angry at various officials in Congress and/or the Administration. If you wish to express your concerns, criticisms, or suggestions to these officials you may do so as citizens but not as employees of the USGS. Use of USGS computers, e-mail, telephones, stationary, or work time to express your political views to or about political leaders is against the law. Doing so would put you in legal jeopardy and also put the USGS in a position of great vulnerability. I understand that all employees will be paid for the furlough days. I want to extend my personal thanks to the 70 WRD employees who stayed on the job fielding many difficult questions from employees and customers. I know it was not easy. We must now put this experience behind us and return our focus to doing the job we were trained and hired to do: providing the people of the United States with timely, accurate, unbiased, and useful information about the Nation's water resources. ********************************************************** * Robert M. Hirsch Phone: 703/648-5215 * * Chief Hydrologist Fax: 703/648-5002 * * 409 National Center Internet: rhirsch@usgs.gov * * U.S. Geological Survey * * Reston, VA 22092 * **********************************************************