About three years ago, Kootenai Electric Cooperative’s Thomas Maddalone, Dan Hannon and Bob Jacobson had a glimmer of an idea: an indoor space to train apprentices and refresh the skills of lineworkers.

“I heard about a training facility that was indoors in Ohio,” says Maddalone, safety director at the Rathdrum, Idaho-based co-op. “And when I was in the area attending another training, I had the opportunity to visit it.” That facility is the Central Ohio Lineworker Training Center run by Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives in Mt. Gilead.

The idea gained traction when Kootenai EC was designing a new headquarters facility. They seized on the opportunity to not just build a training center but also design it themselves.

“Fortunately, our board and management got behind the idea,” says Jacobson, a general foreman. Last October, the co-op held a ribbon-cutting for the Jake Booth Memorial Training Center, a spacious 8,000-square-foot indoor facility with a 43-foot-high ceiling. It was named in honor of a second-year Kootenai EC apprentice who died on the job in October 2007.

“A huge benefit of an indoor training facility is that apprentices and lineworkers can train safely regardless of weather, season changes or daylight to better prepare for work in less favorable conditions,” says Hannon, a foreman. “Our lineworkers can now test new technologies in a controlled environment rather than out in the field.”

A larger, more modern facility was essential because the co-op headquarters was starting to burst at the seams.

With an expanding workforce and membership at 30,000 and growing, “the space our crews needed to meet daily and complete required safety sessions was no longer adequate,” says Erika Neff, vice president of member service and experience.

“There is a lot of new equipment being introduced in the industry,” Jacobson says. “Now we can install it in the training center so we can have hands-on training on how it works.”

The canvas for the project was a giant warehouse on Kootenai EC’s new 180,000-square-foot campus.

“It was completely empty inside,” Jacobson says. “We asked our builders to basically just give us the roof and the room, and we added everything else.”

Besides enough space and height to set poles and practice hot stick techniques, “everything else” included things like a transformer wall and a complete underground system with junction boxes. Both areas are energized, “designed to mimic what’s out in the field, but at a lower voltage,” Jacobson says.

The transformer space is a particular point of pride.

“Linemen have to understand how transformers work, and we wanted it to look and act like the real thing,” Hannon says. “We didn’t want to have a board where you just plug things in.”

Since the October dedication ceremony, the center has become a regional resource, with KEC hosting joint trainings with manufacturers and other utilities in the region.

With about 60 years of experience between them, Hannon and Jacobson say they hope the training center helps tomorrow’s lineworkers be “smarter and better than we are now.” They expect to keep adding features as the industry and member demands evolve.

“Hopefully the next generation of linemen will take it to the next level and will benefit from it,” says Hannon. “That’s how we evolve as a trade.”