By Nick Sambides Jr.
Bangor Daily News
BANGOR, Maine — Pat Cameron was more than halfway to the top of a 270-foot industrial wind tower in Township 8 Range 3 when he felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his chest.
Seeing her fellow electrician’s peril, Shianne Valenzuela immediately rappelled to Cameron and hooked her rope harness onto his. Within seven minutes, Valenzuela had the 43-year-old Winthrop man on the ground, where paramedics could help him.
Had it been an actual rescue instead of a training scenario, with Cameron suffering a real heart attack, Valenzuela was pretty confident that the “rescue” would have been as successful in real life as in practice.
“That’s what the training is all about,” said Valenzuela, 31, of New Gloucester. “We keep doing it until we’re comfortable at it.”
Valenzuela and Cameron were among 36 electricians, boat builders and wind power company workers who finished a two-week Tower Rescue and Composite Training course Friday on Stetson Mountain.
Offered through Larkin Enterprises Inc. of Lincoln, two state International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, IBEW, unions and Maine’s North Star Alliance Initiative - a state-government-created effort to produce jobs in Maine’s boat building, marine and composite industries - the training will help create a work force to build and maintain the thousands of wind turbines being planned around the state and nation over the next decade, said Brendan “Mike” Ireland, Larkin’s business development manager.
“You should be certified to climb a tower in case something happens,” Ireland said Monday. “If you are by yourself, you could get tied up in your rigging and get in trouble. If you climb in pairs and something happens, and both of you are trained in tower rescue, your partner will know what to do to save you.”
Many of the 36 workers last year helped build the $320 million, 132-megawatt Kibby Mountain Wind Power Project in Franklin County, New England’s largest industrial wind site. They hope the training will help them secure jobs building and maintaining future wind farms.
“It’s a real help, just from the safety aspect,” said Rick Waceken, 39, an electrician from Millinocket.
“Most EMTs are not trained to go up inside a tower,” Valenzuela said. “It’s important to be able to act quickly if you want to save someone’s life.”
“By OSHA standards, you have to be able to initiate a rescue within six minutes,” Waceken said. “When you are hanging in a harness, your circulation could be cut off in seven minutes.”
The 36 trainees attended a three-day Introduction to Composites course at the Maine Advanced Technology Center in Brunswick and a five-day Tower Rescue course taught by Rescue Geeks of Maine at an indoor training facility, HSE Gould in South Portland, said Ireland, a Lincoln Planning Board member.
Their last stop: several days of rescue training at the Stetson Mountain industrial wind site near Danforth, thanks to a donation from First Wind of Massachusetts, Ireland said. First Wind operates wind farms in the Stetson Mountain area and in Mars Hill and plans at least four more around the state.
North Star paid Larkin $139,300 to provide the training, Ireland said.
The money represented the last portion of a $14.4 million federal work force development grant under the Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development program offered by the U.S. Department of Labor starting in 2005, said Christina Sklarz-Libby, a program manager at North Star.
Having helped establish the training program and the training center in Brunswick, plus another in Thomaston to aid the state’s composites industries, Sklarz-Libby is hopeful that a combination of state and private industry contributions will keep the training program going.
Matt Kearns, vice president of business development for First Wind, said the training was an important step toward making Maine a national center for wind industry workers and that First Wind would hold more training sessions next year.
“It’s another good option for people, to give them a chance to enter this profession,” Kearns said Monday.
Waceken and Valenzuela are supporters of wind power. With the construction industry badly slumping, Kibby Mountain gave Valenzuela and 26 other electricians about six months of well-paying work earlier this year building Phase I, or 22 of the site’s 44 Vestas V90 three-megawatt wind turbines, she said. The turbines went on line last month. Phase II construction starts this spring.
Without the Kibby Mountain job, Valenzuela probably would have been unemployed for at least six months, she said.
The workers acknowledge that wind tower construction is lucrative - Kibby Mountain, for example, contributed more than $75 million to the state in materials and labor revenues, with more than $6 million spent in Franklin County - but short-term. Once turbines are operational, such sites employ one to three electricians for maintenance, they said.
That doesn’t matter much to Richard Deering, a business manager with IBEW Local 567.
“All construction is considered short money if a building project lasts four or five months,” Deering said Monday. “If we were to build a school, we wouldn’t keep the same guys at the school when the kids come in.”
The electricians estimate that if all the state’s planned offshore and land-based farms go on line, the construction work alone could provide as much as a 25 percent boost to their livelihoods, work they will be happy to take.
“There’s no guarantee that it will be our guys doing the work, but with all the wind projects in the planning stages, we see something new for us,” Deering said. “It’s the kind of thing that we hope to become really proficient at, and competitive at, when it comes to procuring work.”
Copyright 2009 Bangor Daily News