The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) currently operates 29 power-generating hydro plants and one pumped-storage plant. Between June 1, 2022, and May 31, 2024, employees at TVA’s hydro plants were paid a total of $71.7 million. Of this $71.7 million, $15.1 million (21 percent) was paid for 187,579 hours of overtime to 243 employees.
To help manage the effects of fatigue, TVA Safety Procedure 18.018, Fatigue Management, establishes “. . . a process to provide reasonable assurance that the effects of fatigue and degraded alertness do not impact an individual’s ability to safely and competently perform their duties.” Due to the high number of overtime hours worked at some of TVA’s hydro plants, we performed an evaluation to assess TVA’s management of overtime at hydro plants.
We determined significant amounts of overtime were worked at some hydro plants. Specifically, we determined 58 percent (108,796 hours) of the 187,579 hours of overtime was worked at 5 of the 30 hydro plants. The overtime worked was the equivalent of 24 full-time employees. We also determined some employees worked significant amounts of overtime. There were 30 instances where employees worked over 1,000 hours of overtime in a single year and 2 employees worked approximately 2,000 hours of overtime in a single year. Additionally, we determined that TVA may not be accurately capturing the effects of fatigue because (1) fatigue evaluations are not being performed and (2) fatigue data is not being trended as required by the Fatigue Management procedure.
