UTILITY LINE LOCATOR TRAINING - Key Persons
Hello, my name is Wade Averett. I started my locating career in 1994 locating telecom systems. Over the course of 24 years I've located all kinds of utilities including primary and secondary power lines, water lines, sewer lines, fiber and copper telecom lines, oil and gas gathering systems, well pads, cathodic protection systems, transmission and distribution pipelines and more.
My initial training was poorly done, not a huge surprise considering that training in this arena has been sorely lacking in the past and still is for the most part. My training then consisted of about three hours. (I was lucky. Most people don't even get that!) Essentially I was told "Here is the cable, here is how you hook-up the transmitter, and here is how you find it with the receiver". Unfortunately I was forced to learn a lot by trial and error which is incredibly inefficient. Thankfully I was able to piece together some information with the help of a few outstanding telecom techs.
I worked as a contract locator for 16 years, the last 10 of which I supervised and managed the states of Wyoming and Kansas. In 2010 my wife Terri and I started our own contract locating company. Shortly thereafter we decided to take a training course offered by Center Line Resource Inc. I learned more in that 2-day class than I had in the previous 16 years! We were shocked!
That's why I'm so excited to be a part of Center Line Resource. The training in the past has been woefully inadequate and I have a chance to help change that. I now have the privilege of passing along my knowledge and experience in the hope of improving the accuracy of tomorrow's locators.