While construction activities have not stopped in Oregon as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship training programs have.

Union and nonunion training centers alike have shuttered their operations in the past two weeks to avoid unnecessary face-to-face interactions. One is Oregon Tradeswomen Inc., which last month celebrated the opening of its new 8,000-square-foot shop and headquarters in Southeast Portland. Now its office is closed through March 31.

“I can tell you that all staff are currently working remotely,” OTI communications director Mary Ann Naylor said. “We were able to complete training in the new space, but we did cancel the graduation ceremony on March 12.”

OTI canceled an environmental worker training and delayed the start of its spring pre-apprenticeship training until April 14. In addition, the group’s popular annual career fair, normally held in May, has been rescheduled this year for Sept. 25 and 26.

“We’re in process of sorting out the details, and making backup plans,” Naylor said. “We are also looking at ways to up our technology game to provide components of our training and education in a virtual manner, including information sessions about our class, career education, and portions of our curriculum that currently happen in the classroom.”

Virtually all union-affiliated training centers in the Portland-metro area shut down in-person operations before Friday, said Robert Camarillo, executive secretary of the Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council. One of the only exceptions is Operating Engineers Local 701, which is continuing to offer limited training due to the nature of the trade, which places operators outside the normal risks inherent on a crowded jobsite.

“We had a conference call, and just about every one of (the training centers) have closed down the apprenticeships for the next several months at least,” Camarillo said. “Some are utilizing long-distance learning to continue to offer instruction as much as possible. Everybody is getting a little creative.”

Local 701 managed to wrap up a training round recently, said Jim Anderson, the union’s business manager. Recruitment and interviews of new apprentices will continue, he added, but full-scale training is on hold.

“We got the round of apprentices through last week,” he said. “There were 12 apprentices, and we had them set up two per instructor and we rotated them through. But for now we’re going to hold off on training classes until we get the OK from the governor.”

At the Northwest College of Construction in Northeast Portland, all apprenticeship classes are suspended until at least April 5 while administrators try to devise ways in which to offer instruction safely.

Instructional efforts at NWCOC are changing to remote and online forms for the time being, said Laurie Emery, the college’s interim executive director. Also, administrative staffers are being asked to work from home.

“We’ve never experienced anything like this before,” she said. “My team and I are developing an online training system that will go into effect April 6, but we’re still working out all of the kinks. As far as we’re concerned we will continue with classes, just with no hands-on instruction.”

The timeline is uncertain at present, but when circumstances allow, students will be able to receive required in-person instruction and take exams.

“It’s not a perfect system, but it keeps students in classes,” Emery said. “Our concern is not having students get too far behind, as well as those apprentices also who are ready to graduate. We want to help them meet that goal and as soon as possible.”

None of this will happen on regular schedule, Emery said, but it will allow the college to meet the hourly training requirements for the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. The pandemic also is hastening plans by the college to move more instruction online, she added.

“We’ve been talking about online training for some time, but it’s never really fit into our model,” she said, mainly because National Center for Construction Education and Research accreditation requires in-person testing with a proctor.

“That makes it difficult to go to a fully online program,” she said. “But in a way it makes me glad that we have this option available to us now. Maybe it’s a future option for us; I don’t know. It will be based on what BOLI allows, but at least we have a framework.”

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When Jeanne Staton and Leonard Staton divorced about two decades ago, Jeanne got Staton Companies and Leonard got “everything else,” she said.

She says she still thinks she got the better end of that deal.

Jeanne Staton, 70, recently stepped down as head of Staton Cos. – one of the largest demolition firms in the Pacific Northwest. She was a force in the Oregon construction industry for more than four decades, and the first woman president of the Oregon-Columbia chapter of Associated General Contractors. This summer she’ll receive the AGC‘s SIR Award for her contributions.

“We just love her and respect her greatly and wish her the very best,” said Mike Salsgiver, executive director of AGC’s Oregon-Columbia chapter. “Her contributions are many and she will be remembered here for a long time.”

Longtime Staton Cos. employee and former general manager Ron Richey bought Staton’s share to become president and sole executive officer.

“She’s been a great, great partner,” Richey said. “She built this company. And employees last a long time here. That tells you what type of a company it is, and Jeanne’s created that. She’s done a wonderful job here.”

Jeanne married Leonard Staton, 18 years her senior, in 1971. Three weeks later, he was out of a job. With experience in demolition, Leonard pursued a contract to demolish the old Springfield High School in his hometown. That led to excavation contracts. Eventually the couple started to do a little better than break even.

With the Eugene/Springfield area experiencing rapid urban renewal, it was a fortunate time to be in the development business, Jeanne Staton said.

The roughest patch, she said, was in the 1980s, when interest rates rose as high as 18 percent. The firm hit a slump and had to borrow money to pay its bills. Keeping up with numerous equipment payments made for trying times.

“When we finally paid off that loan, it was an albatross off our shoulders,” she said.

Jeanne Staton gradually took over more and more of the company as Leonard lost interest in the company, she said. Today it employs about 45 people in Springfield and Portland, many who’ve been with the company for multiple decades. Her son, Jeff Staton, is an estimator/operator with the firm.

Jeanne Staton watched as automation radically changed the field of demolition, to the point where today, Staton Cos. workers rarely touch building materials directly. Recycling too has become an important factor in every project. Now up to 90 percent of commercial buildings can be recycled for profit, and around 60 to 70 percent of residential buildings.

Jeanne Staton said there was a time when her company paid owners to wreck their buildings, because of the value of the recyclable metals and other materials.

“Now you do just anything you can think of besides landfilling,” she said. “First you try to sell it. Then you try to give it away. Get creative – anything besides landfilling.”

Being a woman in a male-dominated field was always a bit of a double-edged sword for Jeanne Staton. For one thing, she felt she had to work harder to earn respect from male colleagues. But unlike some women who’ve experienced harassment in construction and related fields, Staton said she was never treated unfairly.

“I always thought that it was an advantage for me, because people certainly do remember you,” she said. “It just takes determination.”

Staton kept regular office hours until recently. She plans to dedicate more time to industry and community causes, including those tied to Associated General Contractors, Associated Oregon Industries and the Northwest College of Construction. She said she’ll surely travel more.

Important issues include deregulation, opposition to a gross receipts tax and workforce development through apprenticeship programs.

“I intend to stay pretty busy,” she said.

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Study hard in school, teachers would say to John Kalkhoven, or you’ll end up a ditchdigger.

Kalkhoven is today head of Titan Utilities of Beaverton, and though his field of work is not exactly ditchdigging, he’s worked a long, successful career in the trenches. With the construction labor shortage slamming firms that handle water, sewer and storm lines, he wants more people to study hard – and enter the field of utility construction.

Kalkhoven’s idea for a permanent training location for underground utility workers is becoming a reality in the parking lot of the Northwest College of Construction. The is intended to streamline technical and safety training, showcase new products, and help combat a labor shortage affecting the pipe-laying industry as much as any other. The team involved, including sponsors with the Northwest Utility Contractors Association, says the one-of-a-kind device could help educate the entire construction industry and lead innovation.

Or, as NWCOC President Bob Strader said, it’s pretty exciting “for a hole in the ground.”

Brand new clay

The NWCOC pipe trainer idea started about seven years ago with an emerging construction material and the city of Portland.

Portland and most modern cities were once awash in . By 1933, around 1,100 miles of terra cotta was employed in conveying this city’s raw sewage directly into the Willamette River. The product fell out of fashion as technology advanced and plastics took over. Eventually, a product called (VCP) hit the market, made by heating clay until it gains the water resistance of glass. Officials with Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services were interested in its superior durability and lower environmental impact.

But VCP was a new product, and a sensitive one at that – it could crack easily if installed improperly. The local contracting community lacked installation experience as well as a reliable supplier. So BES had to step in and become the region’s clay pipe authority, eventually targeting a supplier in the Tacoma, Washington, area and reaching out to the National Clay Pipe Institute for materials and instruction. It offered training sessions to local contractors and even helped devise effective installation methods, senior engineering associate Colleen Harold told Public Works Magazine at the time.

“We learned how to work with pipe so that we were the experts, not the contractor,” she said. “We found out, for example, that we couldn’t use chains and nylon straps to handle the pipe because it was too slick and that grippers worked best.”

After the city’s construction specifications were amended to include VCP standards, BES began a pair of sewer rehabilitation projects piloting VCP in Portland. By this time, the NWCOC and the NWUCA had been brought into the loop, and an idea started to jell with Kalkhoven.

Personnel trainer

Technically speaking, the pipe trainer coming to the NWCOC will be a trench 60 feet long with a big manhole at one end for confined space testing. It will have three levels of depth – 4 feet, 9 feet and 12 feet. At the 4-foot depth a removable grate will allow for instruction on the installation of basins.

When not in use, steel plates will cover the hole to allow vehicle parking on top.

Accompanying NWCOC training programs will address installation of the numerous varieties of pipe – PVC, precast concrete, ceramic and cast-iron. Corporate reps will instruct workers on manufacturer best practices – to reduce the kind of installation errors that can lead to million-dollar lawsuits.

Unlike in other sub-trades that have more formal training programs, instruction in the field of utility contracting has long been old-fashioned – firsthand knowledge passed down directly. Often this would take place in a field behind a supplier’s office.

This is because when it comes passing on knowledge, there’s no substitute for firsthand, said Kalkhoven, who as a teenager accompanied his contractor father on jobsites.

“You can read as many books as you want,” he said. “But when you see it and you do it, it just learns faster.”

This is why NWUCA member firms eagerly bought into the pipe trainer, according to contractors and college officials. They report that manufacturers in particular have shown interest, eager to accustom new workers to their unique product features.

“It will be a good thing for our industry,” said Dan Vannoy, vice president of Emery & Sons Construction. “There’s certainly nothing similar to this anywhere else.”

This week, NWUCA member Westech Construction will donate labor to saw the pavement and perform other prep work prior to what will be about a two-month construction process involving apprentices in class at NWCOC.

With safety being a huge issue across the industry, the trainer will assist with instruction on shoring, cave-ins, confined space and “competent person.” Contractors have expressed interest in bringing staff members in for safety training.

“It gives us a very realistic work study environment for confined space and fall protection,” Strader said.

Labor pains

Since the end of the Great Recession, the college, NWUCA and others in the construction industry have been preoccupied with the next existential dilemma – a generational shift away from the skilled trades.

“It is a challenge just finding guys to do the work,” Vannoy said.

Construction is notoriously slow to change, but new products and methods can take hold quick, as Portland’s BES showed with VCP. Since 2010, the city has constructed five projects specifying a total of 62,400 linear feet of clay pipe. Bill Ryan, BES’ chief engineer, estimates about 20 percent of in-service pipe in Portland is now clay (terra cotta or VCP).

About one-third of all construction projects in the area involve public works utilities, and Ryan said he notices a definite graying of the utility contracting workforce.

“Every day in the field we see a decreasing number of old hands,” he said.

Utility contractors report that there’s more to pipe fitting than there might seem, and the margin of error is always slim. All pipe is tested after it’s been laid, and if a line doesn’t “test,” the contractor has to fix the problem – work it won’t get paid for.

Mathew Warrington, president of Westech Construction, said pipe fitting isn’t just a craft. Any city street job could potentially involve a snarl of water lines, sewer lines and storm lines as well as conduit and drainage.

“There are so many different kinds of pipe and they’re all laid differently,” he said. “It’s not just ditchdigging – there’s definitely an art to it.”

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