First responders at Unitil have begun making their first visits to Safety Town – a new training facility in Kensington, N.H., that will simulate gas leaks and provide opportunities for utility gas employees to sharpen their skills.
Safety Town is a first-of-its-kind facility for Unitil – a provider of electricity and natural gas to customers in New England – and features a series of underground natural gas pipes that create a leak field around a large shed in a gated parking lot at the company’s training center on Drinkwater Road.
The unique facility allows workers to experience real-world gas leak scenarios designed to test their knowledge of procedures and best practices as they search for gas leaks, troubleshoot, and ensure the safety of themselves and the public.
“Safety Town will be a valuable resource that will give our first responders a safe, controlled environment where they can train and hone their skills in the area of leak detection in order to provide safe, reliable and efficient service to our customers and the communities we serve,” Unitil External Affairs Director Alec O’Meara said.
During training exercises, workers face different variations and degrees of gas leaks and must recognize and react to those situations. The facility includes approximately eight leak points that can be turned on and off as required for leak survey, investigation, and leak classification training and testing.
Planning for Safety Town began about two years ago and involved a team of Unitil gas workers who recently installed the piping and other equipment.
Alan Browning, Unitil’s Senior Supervisor for Technical Training and Learning Development, oversaw much of the trench work and pipe installation during Safety Town’s construction and led the first training exercises in May.
“We were able to set up different scenarios of underground leaks that can be very difficult to troubleshoot and pinpoint and find out in the real world. We can turn them on here and show the folks how to use their skills and training in an effort to think through the different scenarios in order to find the leaks in a timely fashion so we can repair them,” he said. “We can do underground leaks near a building, away from a building, near other underground structures like confined spaces, manholes, and catch basins. We’re also able to turn on and simulate above-ground piping leaks and leaking regulators.”
Safety Town is the latest hands-on training opportunity for gas employees. In recent years, Unitil also launched a comprehensive virtual reality training program designed to supplement field training. The VR program allows workers to experience different virtual scenarios ranging from a potentially dangerous leak to patrolling transmission pipeline to ensure its safety. With the high-tech program, which requires the use of VR goggles and a pair of handheld controllers to manipulate digital objects, trainees are instantly transported into a virtual neighborhood or elsewhere in the field to handle realistic simulated calls and other tasks.
