IRS Employees Return Nearly 6 Months After Flooding Closed Headquarters

S usan Hedeler is going home -- to eleven-eleven, as she calls it.

The Internal Revenue Service headquarters building, at 1111 Constitution Ave. NW, has reopened, almost six months after heavy rains flooded the basement and sub-basement, destroying electrical and air-conditioning equipment.

Hedeler is set to be in her sixth-floor office this morning and to get back to old routines, including a breakfast stop at a favorite eatery. She will no longer be one of the "displaced," working from home or from IRS offices in New Carrollton.

Her commute to 1111 will take about 30 minutes -- a vast improvement over the 90 minutes she spent on buses and trains traveling from her Northern Virginia home to New Carrollton. Her workday will be smoother, , with colleagues nearby and a complete set of reference files not far from her desk.

The June flooding came as Hedeler's office, media and publications, was ramping up production of tax forms, instruction sheets and other material for the 2007 tax filing season. Managers were at an outside-the-Beltway retreat, but the management meeting quickly turned into a planning session when the staff learned that the flood had closed the headquarters for what officials initially projected would be 30 days.

"It was rather fortuitous that we were all there," Hedeler said. Managers went to work contacting employees and figuring out who worked on critical programs and needed to be given offices first.

By mid-July, all of the publications staff had been assigned temporary cubicles and offices in New Carrollton. But the staff kept up with their work, even as they waited for offices, because many could work elsewhere on their laptops.

"It was a bit of a challenge," Hedeler recalled. Employees used to working together on one floor of the downtown headquarters were spread across three buildings at New Carrollton. Although the IRS moved computers and files from downtown to the temporary offices, there were times when employees had to hunt down documents or try to retrieve them electronically.

"Some of the things I thought weren't necessary to take with me, I missed while I was there," Hedeler said. Still, she added, "you can't take everything with you."

Despite the sense of camping out in New Carrollton, Hedeler said she had "positive experiences," such as meeting new people and forging new working relationships.

The IRS accommodated many employees by putting them on flexible work schedules and allowing them to work at home and at telecommuting centers. Hedeler said that she worked from home "a couple of days a week" and that "being able to be hooked up to the computer at home certainly made my life a lot easier."

But she missed working at the IRS headquarters. She returned once to get some work material and ran into her boss. "We both sort of simultaneously said, 'This is so sad.' It was. It was like someone or something had died. It was an eerie feeling."