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Jon Oldenburg, a pipe layer with Westech Construction, sets a manhole in place while building a pipe trainer at the Northwest College of Construction. (Sam Tenney/91��Ƶ)

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.

Jon Oldenburg, right, signals as James Holmes, operating a front loader, backfills a trench dug for a new pipe trainer being installed at the Northwest College of Construction. (Sam Tenney/91��Ƶ)

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.”