ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
From the cost of the shutdown overseas to a few numbers here at home. Eight, that's how many days the government has now been shutdown with no sign of a resolution.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Nearly 350,000 Department of Defense employees returned to work yesterday. An estimated 450,000 people are still furloughed.
SIEGEL: More than a dozen people are furloughed contractors employed by the consulting firm IntelliDyne in Falls Church, Virginia. But instead of having to make do without pay or benefits, their non-furloughed colleagues decided to share their paid time off. IntelliDyne CEO Tony Crescenzo says the idea started with the company's senior executives pooling their paid time off.
TONY CRESCENZO: And that flowed in to a call to anyone in the organization who would want to volunteer PTO. And so we went from what was effectively about 250 hours worth of additional time to over 1,500.
BLOCK: Five hundred percent. Utah's Department of Workforce Services reports a 500 percent increase in the number of people requesting unemployment since the shutdown began.
SIEGEL: One Metrorail worker was killed and two more were injured on Sunday here in Washington, D.C., in a welding accident. But the National Transportation Safety Board will not investigate. The reason, it says, the accident did not meet criteria for exempting its furloughed employees to inspect the site.
BLOCK: Four hundred one. That's how many National Park Service sites remain closed, from Civil War battlefields to the State of Liberty. And that meant a quick change of plans for Genevieve Jeuck and Michael Sallemi of West Milford, New Jersey. Jeuck says they had bought a permit to get married at Grand Canyon National Park. The wedding was scheduled for last Wednesday.
GENEVIEVE JEUCK: Everything was in flux up until the actual day of our wedding, and we had to change the location, we had to change the location of the dinner afterwards and we had to change the location of the hotels for our guests.
BLOCK: But change, they did, and the two married in Sedona.
SIEGEL: One last number for you: 67 million. That is the rough age in years of a remarkably intact T-Rex skeleton now in Montana that was supposed to head this week to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Here's museum director Kirk Johnson.
KIRK JOHNSON: Since we're cooperating with the National Park Service and the Army Corps of Engineers and the Museum of the Rockies and the Smithsonian, three of those organizations have furloughed federal staff and we just can't do it. There's nobody to actually do the work.
BLOCK: The T-Rex was expected to arrive at the museum on October 16th to coincide with National Fossil Day. But now, it'll have to wait a few more months till April to make the trip. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.