WAO 2021 Sessions
Three sessions to share our experience with the COVID-19 pandemic: first reactions, new policies and best practices, and finally but not least lessons learnt. Join the Workshop and share your experience with your colleagues from all over the world.
Session I: First reactions to the pandemic
March 2020 is a time we will remember and talk about for many years to come. It is the time when COVID-19 moved from epidemic to pandemic.
How did the pandemic affect your lab? Did your Business Continuity Plan include ‘pandemics’? If not, how long did it take your lab to come up with a COVID-19 response plan? Did your lab close down? Did you have to let staff go? How did you ensure site security and machine integrity during a time with minimum staff on site? How and when did you re-open the lab? How fast was your lab able to adapt to remote work? How did the ways of doing business at your lab change during the first month, second, third...?
Session II: Running a Beam Particle Accelerator during the COVID-19 pandemic
After the initial response to the COVID-19 outbreak, our facilities had to settle into a new way of doing business. Over the past year, what new practices like teleworking, remote access for troubleshooting, remote control, …., did your facility adopt to safely deal with the pandemic? How did life change in the control room? How did you ensure health safety for your staff?
Operating under the pandemic might have had an impact on your operational performance. How were your maintenance activities and outages affected? Did you see a drop in overall beam performance? Did you change the way on-call response was handled? What was the impact to the users?
Session III: Lessons learned from the pandemic
The outbreak of the pandemic in spring 2020 forced us to quickly adopt a lot of new policies and technologies for accelerator operations. Before, we did not need or like this policies or technologies, or we did not have the money and resources to introduce them.
If, one day, the pandemic is over, will we just go back to the operation we had before, or will we be happy to keep some of the pandemic driven innovations, because they have proven to be useful?
Talks in this session should focus on COVID-19 driven changes in operation that have become good practice, like remote or even automated operation (including machine learning?), remote access for troubleshooting or beam studies, remote training, video calls to the control room and other useful innovations.
