-Editorial
The Imperial Irrigation District continues to adapt to the current pandemic by taking care of their employees working at home.
At the June 16 IID Board meeting, General Manager Henry Martinez spoke about how they are working with their employees from home while this pandemic is still going on. Martinez said they have seen an increase of employees that have tested positive for the virus. Martinez said 108 employees have been tested, from those nineteen have tested positive and seventy-nine have tested negative. There are ten employees that are waiting for results right. Of the nineteen that tested positive, four have recovered and returned to work.
‘We are taking the temperature of employees and visitors that come to our facilities, practicing social distancing, and makes sure we keep the workplace virus-free as much as possible,” Martinez said.
Martinez added that they have sequester, ten employees, to the system information center and are evaluating another round of sequestration and will be making that determination this week. This is part of the district’s pandemic response plan to mitigate employee exposure and assist in ensuring the continuity of customer service. The emergency measure recognizes the importance of the district’s employees in continuing the delivery of critical utilities to customers and the importance of maintaining a safe workplace.
The IID is also looking at bringing people back to work since there are 300 employees working offsite at this moment.
“We are doing teleworking and our employees have been provided with equipment to work from home with access to the system,” Martinez told the board.
Martinez and his staff will begin evaluating how to bring them back to the office at the right time. Earlier this month they brought back 30 employees but when they saw the increase in the number of cases in the community they decided to wait a couple of more weeks.
“This is a pilot, we will basically bring back a small group of employees to set up protocols and then evaluate when we go from there,” Martinez said. “We want to take this slow so we can make sure everyone returns safely.”