With a vision to help promote education and safety, REC has added a training yard to their headquarters.

“I had been thinking about the need for a training yard for a while,” says Casey Henson, Manager of Safety and Loss Control/Facilities. “After I took over as the Manager of Safety and Loss Control/Facilities, allowed the idea to come to fruition and add the additional poles and start building our training yard.”

Before building the training yard, REC had one pole for the line workers to practice pole top rescue and climbing. The newly expanded training yard added four additional poles with three-phase construction and additional equipment on the poles for continued training.

“It has been exciting to watch our line workers want to go to the training yard to expand their knowledge and understanding and help teach each other,” Henson adds. “The idea behind this training yard, is to give our employees an opportunity to expand on what they learn at our statewide association’s training yard and do their tasks the safest way possible.”

Since adding this additional opportunity for the employees, the district line workers and the more experienced line workers have been sharing their experiences and teaching our newer employees about what they will encounter while being on-call or helping in other areas of the service territory.  

“Currently, we only have overhead construction with transformers, but we have plans to add an underground loop and transformer for our line workers to identify bad underground lines,” Henson says. “I would also like overhead single-phase construction to be added as well.”

This training yard is another example of REC using the cooperative principles by providing continued education, information and training for their employees. With better understanding about what the line workers will encounter, will in turn better serve REC's membership.

“Training and safety go hand in hand, and by practicing what you do not always see everyday will allow our employees to have the knowledge they need to do their job efficiently but always keep safety in the front of their mind,” concludes Henson.