GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – Put away your bulls and lassos, and get out your pipe cutters and hardhats. Northeast Wisconsin Technical College gas utility students took part in their own Gas Rodeo this week, after the national event was canceled due to the pandemic.
“Typically in the September time frame, we take a group of our high producing students, good grade-getting students, and we take them down to the national gas rodeo,” said Weekend Gas Utility Instructor Tom Hebert. “Through COVID, we’re unable to do that. So what we wanted to do was still provide all the students with the opportunity to participate in the events that we have.”
The NWTC Gas Rodeo set up students from different classes to compete against each other in a series of skills tests.
“Just kind of a run off of the national program. Obviously we can’t do that because of COVID, but we’re just out here having a little bit of fun competing with other classes,” said student Ivan Troitskiy. “It’s just like real world applications of being able to do it, not as quickly as possible, but as efficiently as possible. Knowing how to shovel, how to put the meter set together, it all comes with experience of doing it here at school.”
Two Northeast Wisconsin Technical College gas utility students take part in a timed trial for putting together a gas meter. (WTAQ/Casey Nelson)
“They’re out here operating equipment, they’re putting meter sets together, they’re hand-digging, putting services in – all the activities that you would do in a typical day of a gas utility employee,” Hebert told WTAQ News. “When they really put all their efforts together in a competition like this, it shows them that they can do things at a much quicker pace and still a safe pace. That really builds the confidence in those students and kind of propels them to the next level.”
There are four national competitions, and a few of their own design.
“One of them is the pipe cut, so you’re just cutting like a 6-inch piece of pipe with a two-faced cutter,” Troitskiy explained. “Then there is the hole dig, so you’re just digging out the hole and trying to uncover the four corners and one dot in the middle. There is the gas service, basically just running gas service, tapping it and all that. And then putting together a meter set and seeing how quickly you can do that.”
But Troitskiy’s favorite, along with several other students, was the mini-excavator and backhoe dexterity test. They set up basketballs and softballs on the tops of traffic cones and used the controls in the vehicle to gather them into the bucket, and then drop them into a bin.
Two Northeast Wisconsin Technical College gas utility students teach WTAQ’s Casey Nelson how to operate a mini-excavator. (PHOTO/WTAQ News)
One student accomplished it all in one large sweeping motion, grabbing all three balls and dropping them in simultaneously – setting a daily record under fifteen seconds. WTAQ’s Casey Nelson, on the other hand, took about two minutes to get one ball in the bucket, and narrowly made the drop into the bin at the end. (It’s not as easy as it looks).
Hebert says the rodeo has been going on as long as he can remember, but estimates the national event has existed for anywhere from 20-30 years. Some companies do local competitions as well. But he says the national stage is important for students, as it connects them with different companies from around the country.
“Our kids won’t get the interaction with the other companies, but we do a job fair here in January. So the companies will come in and interview our students and hopefully employ them also,” Hebert said. “There are opportunities in Wisconsin, but I’ve also placed students in Iowa last year. The PM instructor had people going to the east coast. It’s really all over the United States, because the way they were training the folks here is to be productive and safe on day one in the utility industry…We teach guys how to operate heavy equipment and we’re doing directional drilling and mini-excavators. So the array really matches what the utility industry is doing currently. The school does a fantastic job of matching what the industry is looking for.”
The NWTC courses cover everything from the baseline of what gas is and where it comes from – to how it’s transported and what the pipes look like. But they also focus on the bigger picture of the industry, discussing how jobs are engineered, priced, bid, and performed.
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