Alex Fournier on Blade Repair Safety and SPRAT Certification

Alex Fournier, Director of Composite Operations at Enertek, discusses the importance and training of SPRAT certification for wind turbine technicians. He details the certification levels, recent changes in safety standards, and the significance of proper protective gear and equipment maintenance in rope access and blade repair. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: With wind turbine scaling up and rope access becoming more critical. Technicians need proper training for safe and efficient blade repairs. This week we speak with Alex Fournier director of Composite Operations at Enertek, Alex brings insight on the spread certification process and how recent changes are enhancing safety. Efficiency for technicians working at Height. Speaker 2: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Alex, welcome to the program. Alex Fournier: Thank you guys for having me once again. Allen Hall: Yeah, we're glad to have you back. There's been so much so many changes that has happened since the last time you were here, but today we want to talk about SPRAT training and. What this means for the industry and what the latest and greatest is in terms of sprt. And for those who don't know what SPRT is, it's actually an acronym like most things in Wind, it's the Society of Professional Rope Access Technicians, and they create [00:01:00] the standards around. The knowledge you're supposed to have and the skills you're supposed to have if you want to climb with rope access. Now. I, Alex, I wanna start off first, like how big of a problem do we have right now on the training on rope access technicians? I see a lot of variation across the United States in particular. Are you seeing the same thing, that they're just not so much a concrete standard everybody's using? Alex Fournier: I think in Canada, like we don't have that many schools that offer the course, first of all. So I think we don't have much in the east Coast. We probably have what? Three, four. In the west coast they have a little bit more. And it's often like vendors that will offer it. So it's a mistress, for example, offered a course. They do IDA and spread. I did my course at Novel in Montreal, which is one of the best training center I've seen in all my years of Rob Access. Celtic Falcon too in the East coast. Really good training center. But I [00:02:00] think since we don't have that many, everyone is kinda like on the same page, so everyone talked to each other and the course is pretty well structured, at least in Canada.