The Best Of The Best

One of the most difficult jobs in running an outage services business is locating good quality temporary workers.  They come from all different types of backgrounds.  Some are seasonal workers that are in construction, landscaping, etc. that need to work when there are not busy doing their local seasonal job. Some are looking for a career change but they are not sure exactly what they want to do, so they test the waters on a temporary job like outage work.  You have to weed through the resumes (if they have them), interview and pre-screen them, and hopefully when they commit to the job, they show-up on the job site.  If they show-up, they then need to pass the various tests to getting an unescorted badge for the site and sometimes additional  job training for the work being accomplished.  It can be a tough process to pass at some plants, as it should be.

Yesterday, we lost one of the best outage workers that I have had the pleasure to work with, Bruce P Courtier. Bruce excelled at steam generator nozzle dam installations and control rod drive maintenance which are anything but typical nuclear power jobs. These type jobs are high stress, physically demanding, and potential high exposure type jobs.  Bruce specialized and mastered this work and became the go-to-guy when issues would occur. You could always count on Bruce’s 20+ years experience to fix any problem that would suddenly pop-up.

As many outage workers do, Bruce worked for many companies to fill his outage schedule with as many jobs as possible before the outage season ended.  He was a very likable guy and enjoyed sharing his vast nozzle dam knowledge with the new recruits for the projects. Some new young technicians would look at Bruce and could not believe that this skinny older looking guy from Massena, Iowa was very fast at installing a nozzle dam, so they would put him to the test during mock-up training. Bruce was very confident about his skills and liked the competition, especially from the younger guys.  He would let the new tech install the dam first and it would typically be an acceptable installation time. Being the gentleman that Bruce was, he would congratulate the tech for installing the dam successfully. (Let’s not forget, he probably trained them too!) Bruce would then go and in a flash he was done! The young techs were amazed by his speed and were just schooled by this skinny old looking guy. It was a lesson that was repeated during many mock-up training sessions. Everyone looked up to Bruce and recognized him as “The Best of the Best” as we knew him and told him many times. He will be missed.