April 7, 2010

STEPHEN DAFOE

Training co-ordinator Bill Wilson demonstrates one of the stations in the gasfitters’ lab.

FEATURE | General & trades contracting

Alberta Pipe Trades College ready to open the valve on training

STEPHEN DAFOE

correspondent

EDMONTON

Walking through the hallways of the recently-opened Alberta Pipe Trades College, one gets the sense of being in a modern school, and that is precisely the effect the designers intended.

Classrooms and lockers line the hallways of the $23 million, 55,000 square foot, three-storey facility built by the Plumbers and Pipefitters UA Local Union No. 488, as a school to train current and future steamfitters and pipefitters.

“It’s building for the future,” said training co-ordinator Bill Wilson.

He noted that the facility is in the process of receiving accreditation from the Apprenticeship Board and Alberta Advance Education and Technology.

“We’re certainly looking at shortages in the coming years,” he said.

“The demographic of age at Local 488 is the 45 to 50 range and that’s slowly creeping up as we go along.”

With 14 classrooms, two computer labs and seven shops, the facility has the capacity to train up to 1,400 students a year. However, it is not the size of the facility or the number of classrooms and shops that Local 488 sees as the key to student success, but rather how those shops have been equipped.

“There are bigger facilities, but I don’t think they are as state of the art,” Wilson said. “We’ve certainly turned every rock over to be the most current and ahead in a lot of areas.”

The facility’s showpiece is a three-storey plumbing tower that Wilson said will allow apprentices to do all of the plumbing from a single-storey house to a three-storey walk-up apartment.

“We can do the residential and commercial-type plumbing applications from the ground up, from the drainage right through the roof for the venting,” Wilson said.

Although the piping that was installed for the grand opening last October is still in place, the training co-ordinator explained that a student would start from scratch to build a complete working system through the tower in both copper and plastic piping, as well as fixtures.

The same area of the facility contains a bank of different styles of water pumps for students to work on. They all draw from the school’s 25,000 gallon cistern of recyclable water.

The facility includes a well-ventilated welding shop with individual welding screens, a dedicated soldering lab capable of accommodating up to 23 students at a time, and a dedicated gas fitters’ shop with individual work benches for students to work on.

Wilson explained that the individual benches replicate the various components found in a home, including thermostat, burner controls and valves, and that the shop is set up for gas or propane.

“We can set up faults in the system, so that the gasfitter has to trouble shoot that appliance, whether it be a furnace or whatever,” he said.

While the facility awaits accreditation, which could come in the next couple of months, it will continue to provide skills training for Trade Winds to Success and Women Building Futures, as well as courses for existing union members.

A variety of classes are offered, but the month-long steamfitter/pipefitter course is one of the most popular.

But not all of the programs are confined to the facility, as some rigging courses are taken to jobsites for the local’s own members, as well as for groups that need upgrading.

“It’s a very important aspect of our trade,” he said. “It can kill people, so you have to know what you’re doing.”

Wilson is confident that once the school is ready to take on apprentices, it won’t take long to meet capacity.

He estimated that in the past year, the local has seen 900 applications to join the trade. Wilson noted that the current inventory of jobs valued at more than $5 million in Alberta has reached $239 billion.

“In the height of our boom five years ago, we thought $180 billion was a lot,” he said.

“That dollar figure transcribes to a massive amount of manpower and (with) this building, we’re hoping to help alleviate some of that issue with manpower.”

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