Winter's here!
Use extra caution

On this snowy day:
- Drive slowly. Leave extra time and distance to brake.
- Be sure of your footing when you get out of your car.
- Walk slowly and take small steps.

We are likely to have dangerous icing conditions in walkways and parking lots today, tonight and tomorrow morning. The ground temperature under the snow was warm enough overnight to keep the first layer of snow warm and slushy. When snow plows scrape the pavement, the wet layer left at the surface freezes quickly in the cold. The temperatures are expected to drop all day today and tonight's low is expected to be in the single digits. These cold temps will make deicing materials ineffective. In places that we can not get salt to, such as in between parked cars, dangerous icing will result. Employees should exercise extreme caution while walking on paved surfaces during these conditions.

Nancy Grossman leads NOvA through review process

Nancy Grossman

Fermilab's NOvA project has reached an important moment: If the NOvA team is able to garner the support of its external reviewers, the project could receive construction money as early as February. If anyone has the right combination of skills to make NOvA's case, it is Nancy Grossman.

In January, Grossman became the associate project manager for NOvA. She was project manager for SNuMI, and when that project merged with NOvA, she was selected for this leadership position.

"Nancy is a very organized and insightful project manager," said Elaine McCluskey, the Accelerator and NuMI Upgrades Subproject's deputy manager. "She brings not only her technical experience (to the project), but the necessary 'soft' skills that use humor, listening and communication to meld a group and get tasks accomplished."

During October, Grossman was in the midst of the project's DOE Critical Decision 2 Review. CD-2 is the third of five steps that have to be met for a DOE project to proceed and use approved funds. Grossman's strong history at Fermilab and her positive attitude are aiding her through NOvA reviews, but she also credits her team for keeping her going. "The people on the team are so good," she said. "They help me stay upbeat."

Grossman began her work at Fermilab in 1983 as a graduate student. She was studying solid state physics at the University of Minnesota when Fermilab's High Energy Group recruited her. They flew her to the laboratory that summer and gave her the grand tour.

"It must have been during a shutdown because I got to see several installed detectors," she said. "I saw the buffalo, the geese, the huge detectors -- I was hooked."

Grossman has a strong history of making projects work. She has a background in radiation physics and safety, five years of shift work on E621 and DZero and management experience on MINERvA and NuMI.

When NuMI/MINOS was just starting up in 1998, Grossman joined the team as a level 3 manager. Later she was promoted to deputy project manager on the beamline. Grossman said in this job, all of her previous experiences came together. Thanks to her work in the ES&H Section as a radiation physicist, she was already familiar with the beamline's safety aspects. Grossman added that her previous experience working with DOE officials and scientists helped her when she worked on NuMI and will continue to help her as she advocates for NOvA.

-- Haley Bridger

The waltz of the endcaps

From CMS Times, Dec. 3, 2007

The huge hangar of the CMS surface hall is an unlikely setting for a grand ball, except perhaps if those dancing are 15m diameter endcap disks. The three segments of CMS that are still on the surface (known as YE-1, YE-2 and YE-3) were last week rotating and sliding past each other so as to end up in the reverse order from how they started.

But the reason for this merry dance is far from frivolous. The endcaps are some of the last elements to be installed underground and the changing of order will save time by allowing work to continue in parallel in the pit whilst they are lowered. "We gain a logistic advantage this way," says Technical Coordinator Austin Ball: "Otherwise the nose of the endcap nearest the centre, YE-1, would poke into the central barrel, preventing us from installing the tracker until all three were in place. This way, however, the work can be done in parallel rather than in series; we can lower all three, starting with YE-3, without removing the scaffolding or stopping work."

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