CenterPoint Energy And National Energy Foundation Launch Secondary And Vocational School Safety Training

Beginning this month, CenterPoint Energy, in collaboration with the National Energy Foundation (NEF), will launch a new energy safety education program for secondary, vocational and college students providing relevant on-the-job safety education in Indiana. The Energy Safe Skills program will teach future job site workers how to be safe and protect the communities where they will work.

Energy Safe Skills is a safety education program geared toward vocational instructors and students studying for fields in construction, maintenance and related areas. This program provides essential safety information that everyone working on a job site or involved in job site activities needs to know about the hazards of working around buried natural gas pipelines and other utilities.

“The goal of this program is to provide utility safety education to those individuals who are on the cusp of joining the construction, engineering and maintenance industries. Understanding how to safely design, plan and work around buried utilities is critical to students’ personal safety on the job and their success in their future careers,” said Ashley Babcock, Director of Damage Prevention and Public Awareness at CenterPoint Energy.

Publicly accessible through EnergySafeSkills.org, this no-cost training provides instructors an interactive presentation, student quiz and supplementary STEM-based activities that can be completed within one or two classroom sessions. The curriculum covers characteristics of natural gas, natural gas leak recognition and response, the importance of contacting 811 and safe digging best practices.

“The biggest benefit of this program for teachers is that the interactive presentation and quiz are self-guided, which makes it easy to incorporate into a lesson plan regardless of the instructor’s comfort level and understanding of the topics,” said Kelly Flowers, Senior Program Director at NEF. “We’ve designed this training so the instructors can simply play the self-guided training to their students or they can be more active in leading the discussion.”

While the training is publicly available regardless of an educator’s location, some of the training content, specifically information about Indiana’s safe dig laws, is only applicable to Indiana. For more information about the Energy Safe Skills program, interested educators can visit EnergySafeSkills.org.