Show notes
Alex Fournier, Director of Composite Operations at Enertek, discusses the importance and training of SPRAT certification for wind turbine technicians. He details the certification levels, recent changes in safety standards, and the significance of proper protective gear and equipment maintenance in rope access and blade repair.
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Allen Hall: With wind turbine scaling up and rope access becoming more critical. Technicians need proper training for safe and efficient blade repairs. This week we speak with Alex Fournier director of Composite Operations at Enertek, Alex brings insight on the spread certification process and how recent changes are enhancing safety.
Efficiency for technicians working at Height.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Alex, welcome to the program.
Alex Fournier: Thank you guys for having me once again.
Allen Hall: Yeah, we're glad to have you back. There's been so much so many changes that has happened since the last time you were here, but today we want to talk about SPRAT training and. What this means for the industry and what the latest and greatest is in terms of sprt.
And for those who don't know what SPRT is, it's actually an acronym like most things in Wind, it's the Society of Professional Rope Access Technicians, and they create [00:01:00] the standards around. The knowledge you're supposed to have and the skills you're supposed to have if you want to climb with rope access.
Now. I, Alex, I wanna start off first, like how big of a problem do we have right now on the training on rope access technicians? I see a lot of variation across the United States in particular. Are you seeing the same thing, that they're just not so much a concrete standard everybody's using?
Alex Fournier: I think in Canada, like we don't have that many schools that offer the course, first of all. So I think we don't have much in the east Coast. We probably have what? Three, four. In the west coast they have a little bit more. And it's often like vendors that will offer it. So it's a mistress, for example, offered a course.
They do IDA and spread. I did my course at Novel in Montreal, which is one of the best training center I've seen in all my years of Rob Access. Celtic Falcon too in the East coast. Really good training center. But I [00:02:00] think since we don't have that many, everyone is kinda like on the same page, so everyone talked to each other and the course is pretty well structured, at least in Canada.
Before when I started the course was four days, and then you had one days for the exam. So it's a lot to learn in four days, but now they changed it to five days of course, and then one extra day for the exam. So that give you much time to train and, if you don't understand something you can.
You can really take the time to really understand it. So you're ready for the exam.
Joel Saxum: Alex, let me ask you a question about SPRAT and ia, right? 'cause Sprat is the North American version. IRATA is usually the EU version or rest of the world version. They are they're organizations that push this safety forward and there's, this is how we should do things.
And a lot of times a company will adopt it, say, X, Y, Z operator says, if you're gonna be on ropes on my site, you must be sprat level, this level, that level, that, however. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but this is my take on it. They're not actually like a [00:03:00] governmental association. They're not an OSHA or something that mandates that you must have.
It's just these things are in our industry, sprat best practices. This is what people live by. This is how we do it. Okay. That's correct. Yeah. So can you walk us through the different levels of spray? 'cause I know there's like a 1, 2, 3. What do those all mean?
Alex Fournier: Yeah. Level one basically you're just a basic technician.
You just learn how to move yourself on the ropes basically. So you'll do basic like rope Totaro transfer, or you're gonna pass deviation. All the basic maneuver that you need to know on ropes. You're gonna learn it into your level one which is great. Then to be a level one you just need to be 18-year-old and you can sign up and do your level one.
That's the only requirement. Level two is after you did 600 hours on ropes and six months of experience as a level one. Then you can do your level two which you'll learn more. It will be more like rescue scenario. So you'll do some basic [00:04:00] maneuver combined with rescue, but yeah, so as a level two, you're gonna learn more as taking some charge up and moving some charge up in the air.
And then to be a level three, it's kinda the same thing you do you're level two, so then 600 hours as a level two, and then six months as a level two, and then you can go to level three. And then level three, you do every basic maneuver that I said in level one, but it's rescue, so you're gonna do like a climbings rescue.
You're gonna do deviation rescue, ballet rescue just rope to rope transfer with a victim on you. So it's every maneuver with a rescue because when you're a level tree, normally you're in charge of the site or you're gonna be in charge of. All the employees, not necessarily, but normally that's all it is.
So you wanna make sure that you're able to rescue pretty much everyone in every
Joel Saxum: scenario. So what is, okay, so we have level ones, level twos, level threes. What is a normal, and we're talking blade repair here, [00:05:00] right? This is the Uptime podcast. So what is a normal blade repair, sprat rope access crew look like?
Alex Fournier: So I know a lot of people will be, mad, that's what I'm gonna say. But normally when you work, we call it when the rope access world, the wind turbine industry is the easiest rope access world. Because you're only doing you're only going down. You're only going up. There's not much to it. You're not gonna do crazy deviation or you're not gonna do crazy, like zip line and all that stuff. If you do oil and gas, it's much bigger. But in rope access, in the wind industry, normally a level one and level two. It's pretty much that a level three might be overkill sometimes. On big job you probably want to have one just 'cause you probably have more knowledge and project management.
But normally just a regular team, it's
Joel Saxum: gonna be a level two and a level one. Yeah. And from my experience, basically everybody's dropping down two, two people on the blade. You don't go by yourself. So there's always gonna be two [00:06:00] technicians on that blade. And that makes sense. What you're saying is and while people may not like this of rope access, what it looks and that is a little bit easier because for the most part, you're going up and down and. Two dimensions, right? It's just up down on that one thing. Whereas in, I've been on, I've been offshore on oil and gas crews where you see people in three dimensions, guys going across tanks and all kinds of crazy stuff in between.
Pylons, like that's pretty, that's some pretty advanced stuff. And when you watch those guys work, it is really impressive. Sometimes the really experienced ones, I'm sure they are level threes or whatever, how they can zip around. It's the same thing on a wind turbine though. When you're, if you've never seen that and you watch these people,
Alex Fournier: it's
Joel Saxum: mind blowing.
Alex Fournier: It's really the industrial athletes, that's how we call it normally.
Joel Saxum: But it's really impressive. The seasonality of wind makes that kind of stuff difficult because what happens is from a lot of times, okay, we'll take North America for example, because of our blade repair season. You may be, if you're a rope person, you may be out on ropes from April till September, [00:07:00] October, depending on how far north you are.
And then you got three, four months off. So coming back around to April again, much. A little bit tough, isn't it, when you're coming off the couch.
Alex Fournier: Yeah. And I gotta see a lot of people they take it off in the winter and I don't blame them 'cause it's really cold when you do ropes. But when you come back, you in that if you are of bench board in six months, you shall do a day at a training center to just put you back in your element.
So yeah, you shall still practice a little bit. But yeah, coming back after two months of holidays or three months of. Vacation. It can be hard. Yeah, you're gonna be sore. Definitely. The first you're gonna be sore.
Allen Hall: Let me ask the obvious question, because a lot of guys that do wind turbine work in the summertime do something else in, in the fall and the winter, but they want to stay on ropes.
So is then the sprat carries over. So even if you're just doing spprt work for a wind turbine, you can get over into oil and gas and do some rope work there, or. Wherever the place is. So it's so itpr as a [00:08:00] universal training system in a sense. It's not just wind specific.
Alex Fournier: Yeah. It's basically, it's kinda like a driver license.
And the wind turbine industry is kinda like the car. So let's say you go to oil and gas you have your driver license, your rope access guy. But the car is, let's say like the oil and gas industry, like myself, I started in 2015 as a ax technician. I started doing window cleaning in Montreal.