Trades Building Facing Problems

The new Trades Technologies building is still experiencing major growing pains even nine months after the doors have opened.

More specifically, the welding center is a brand-new building that covers 13,650 square feet, and it cost the college an estimated $6.5 million. The facility comes with many state-of-the-art features, but there are still many obstacles to overcome.

Here are just a few examples of some of the problems that the Trades Technologies building is currently facing or  has already faced in the short nine months since its opening.

Although hands-on classes were set to start at the beginning of September, the building was not usable for the first three weeks of the quarter. Considering that a single quarter of classes in the welding program costs about $2,000, this was a fairly substantial amount of money and time taken away from students.

There are currently plans to have the students make up the missed time in the Summer quarter.

The new building is built on top of a wetland that allows little to no water drainage during the rainy months. As a result, some rooms in the building became entirely unusable during the winter.

“Water would come up through the floor,” said welding instructor Scott Schreiber. “Teachers’ offices had an inch of standing water in them.”

As of the publish date of this article, the water drainage issue has not been resolved, and the welding students can expect more of the same water problems during the winter of 2017.

Another issue with the Trades Technology Building is the way that the workers wired the building’s electricity. The wiring caused such an electrical hazard to students that the building received an emergency shutdown earlier this year. Schreiber’s program contacted the Green River College administration and the emergency committee to inspect the issue. They determined that an “Emergency Shutdown” was necessary for the safety of the students in the building.

“What was happening is that the entire floor was acting like a ground, so if a student would touch metal while standing on the floor, they would complete the circuit,” Schreiber said.

The administration stepped up to the challenge and everyone worked to resolve the problem so that students could resume classes as soon as possible.

The Trades Technology Building currently doesn’t have the number of electrical outlets that was requested by Schreiber and his team.

“We need about 26 more outlets, which is necessary [to the welding program]”, he said.

The new welding booths are not big enough to fit two people inside them at one time. Schreiber pointed out that it is important to be able to fit two people in a booth so that an instructor can demonstrate safe welding techniques to a student in real time.

Also, the installation of an inert-gas system was a promised feature to the building to help bring the welding department into the 21st century. The system is called ‘micro-bulking’ which means that CO2 and Argon gas is mixed on-site in order to make C25, the gas which is used for the actual welding.

The idea was to make the gas mixing process faster and easier for the next generation of welding students. In the past, the students had to spend time unloading gas cylinders off of trucks, move them around, and mix the two types of gas as needed for their class. The goal of the new ‘micro-bulker’ was to cut out the manual aspect of moving tanks and mixing gas.

After the building was built, it became clear that this cutting-edge system could not be used due to mis-planning the amount of space needed for trucks to load and unload the required materials. In addition, the components to mix the gas were not of adequate quality to even handle the needs of the welding department.

“The mixing system failed. We had to go back to the old system that we have used for the last 40 years,” Schreiber said.

To alleviate some of these issues, many of the students spent their winter break and spring break in the shop making fixes in order to get their building up to an adequate level of function and safety. According to Schreiber, each student has donated about 90 hours of work.

The students are getting reimbursed for time spent during spring break, but have yet to see a paycheck.

Looking ahead, Schreiber anticipates another two and a half years of work before the building will be functioning at 100%. But to reach that, the entire building needs to be improved from the ground up.