Show notes
Diane Waghorne, founder of Tech Safety Lines (TSL), and instructor Matt Wehrle explain their approach to wind technician safety training. Allen and Joel had the pleasure of visiting their excellent facility in Dallas, Texas and discuss their impact on the industry. Drawing on expertise from fire and rescue professionals, TSL prepares technicians for high-stress rescue scenarios. The company's global recognition for providing top-quality training is evidenced by their GWO Training Team of the Americas Award. TSL initially began with selling the military compact descender and has recently had their SRK rescue kit certified to ANSI Z359.9 standards.
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we're diving into a crucial topic that affects every professional in our industry, and that's training. As the wind energy sector continues to grow rapidly, the need for standardized high quality safety training has never been more critical.
GWO training has become the gold standard for ensuring that the wind industry professionals are equipped with the essential skills and knowledge to work safely and efficiently. Our guest today is Diane Waghorn, president and CEO of Tech Safety Lines, and Matt Wehrle, Tech Safety Lines instructor as well as a firefighter and paramedic.
Tech Safety Lines is based in Dallas, Texas. And from their founding, Tech Safety Lines has been focused on safety through their start with the Military Compact Descender, to a series of safety products, and now with GWO training, Tech Safety Lines is a leader in wind energy safety. In fact, Tech Safety Lines recently received the GWO Training Team of the Year Americas Award.
Diane and Matt, welcome to the show. Thank you for having us. This is exciting because Joel and I visited the tech safety lines facility a little while ago and we're just super impressed. I don't know how else to describe
Joel Saxum: it, Joel. Yeah, blown away. It was a great facility. Yeah, from the time, we met Diane when we walked in to everybody that we ran into in the facility, shaking hands, Hi, nice to meet you.
Who are you guys? Welcome in. Let's show you this. Let's show you that. Everything clean, ready to go. It was an impressive facility, to say the least.
Diane Waghorne: Oh, thank you so much. We're very proud of our facility and we just welcome visitors and I'm glad you had a good time seeing our facility and allowing us the opportunity to share our instructors with you.
It was just a great time.
Allen Hall: Diane, I think we ought to start with A little bit of your history, because it is so unique to the industry. You really got your start after 9 11 with something called the military compact descender. You want to just touch on how that all got kicked off?
Diane Waghorne: I'd be happy to, um, when 9 11 happened during that time period, I was a stay at home mom.
And I've been a business major in college, but then when I had my children, I wanted to stay home with them. And when 9 11 happened, my son was in college and my daughter just turned 16 and got her driver's license. If I was ever going to go back into the workforce, that was a good time for me. And when I witnessed what happened with horror, as we all did, we just could not believe what we were seeing on our televisions.
I just had this gut feeling that there could have been something, there had to be something. And I thought, the United States military, surely they had something. So I, we had Google back then and you, you start networking and I heard of a product called the Military Combat Descender. And back then it was only on paper.
But Cape Roads is a military manufacturing plant in Connecticut, and they were tasked with finding a way for our servicemen to descend with one hand and have their weapon hand ready. And It was on this miraculous rope that was very small. Back then it was only a three millimeter rope. I think Fort Bragg may still have that three millimeter rope, but I visited with them, I flew out to see them, and it was really astonishing they even gave me an interview, because you just don't do that, a housewife from Dallas, Texas, but back then no one trusted anybody, so they said I could come out.
And I think I got on a plane with only 2 other people on the plane. This was about 3 weeks after 9, 11, if we can remember those days, and I just met with them and said, look, I've heard of this military compact to sender my only ask is that when it's available now, please bring it to the SWAT leaders and the firefighters in my state of Texas.
And that's how it started. I started off my kitchen table. I became a distributor for them. I started doing different. SWAT shut us, but then. Meeting different people and started making some sales. Then long story short, I ended up buying the patent and brought the manufacturing here in Texas. And now I owe my husband some money because I bought this patent from the Rockefeller family.
And I say, okay, what am I going to do now? So I went after the largest construction company in the world. I went after Bechtel and they saw the product. They loved the product. And they said you're going to have to train in order for us to provide, this to our people. Again, I'm a state home mom, and I did not know anything about training.
I went to the city of Dallas and asked to speak to the chief, who would not see me, and passed the note to the captain Captain Brent Wise. And I made a batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies. I went to the I popped open my Tupperware and that's how we all got started. He's a top notch holland. We wrote the curriculum and we became the seventh company globally authorized to train for Bechtel.
So we've been to Angola, Africa, to LNG plants. The company now, I believe we have 40, 000 square feet of training here. I believe I'm in 35 different countries. We have over 50, 000 military combat dissenters. People often say, how the heck did this happen? To me, we all have most of us have someone to me is a superior force.
I, I don't take credit for this. I was guided to this and I'm very passionate about this and I'm very dedicated. I really don't even think that I work. I think it's just such a miracle that I am blessed to be with great people like Matt Wehrle is one of our instructors. He's on the city of Dallas. He's on the Urban Search and Rescue, Task Force One, and all of that.
And part of being a business owner is to be smart enough to surround yourself by great people. And so I have Matt, and I have so many great people here. But I'd love for Matt to be able to tell you a little bit more about the training because the training is really what sets us apart. Yes, we have a great equipment.
There's other great equipment out there, but it's really the training, I think, is the importance of making sure that your employees get the right training, the proper training. To ensure that they go home to their families every day, just like we get to when they should be able to as well.
Allen Hall: I think that's where tech safety lines may differ from a lot of other manufacturers of equipment, of safety equipment, right?
That the manufacturers of safety equipment are not really in the training business, so to speak. But you have taken a slightly different approach where you have a, now a series of safety products that if you go to techsafetylines. com, you can just check them out online. That website is exceptional, so it's easy to see and browse through.
But the more important piece of this is getting trained in that equipment and to know what to do in an emergency situation. And that's where Matt comes in, that, Dad, you brought in some real experts, people that, that work in emergency services to train the WIND technicians in particular, of all the things to think about or be prepared for when an emergency situation happens.
When Joel and I visited, that's why we were so impressed. Everybody we met either had come from a fire or ambulance or some sort of situation like that. And that's an everyday event for fire rescue people. And that's why Matt's so important here. And Matt. When you bring people into your training program, you're just not showing them how to clip on a harness, right?
You're trying to provide them more instructions on what to be aware of, right?
Matt Wehrle: Yeah, absolutely. There's so much more that goes into the rescue, the training, the aspect of what's the implementation of that when this event actually goes down in the field. I think we've often taken training for granted.
Just, name, whatever training you've been to, we've all been to some form of training. We've got lists of it. Yeah, hands up, right? We've all done it. It's check the box. I'll show you how to do this. It's more of a monkey see monkey do. You did it. Great. You move on. We like to train more of a cultural aspect, right?
And that all starts from the top gallery. Talked about the facility, how Diane sets the stage for our culture here. And that trickle down effect happens through our instructors. And then once we get to the floor and we get training with the students, the idea is not just. ABC and D move on down the road.
The idea is how do we train that theoretical approach? So nine, 10, 12, two years, months from now,