Tourist season is in full swing at Clark Public Utilities. With the school year well underway, yellow buses carrying fourth- and fifth-graders from across Clark County brighten the 117th Avenue Operations Office parking lot most Tuesdays through Fridays. During October through June last year, more than 4,300 students from eight districts and 43 schools experienced the popular two-hour public utility field trip.
With 50 students sitting on the tour room floor, Maxie Lofton, communications coordinator at Clark Public Utilities and chief student tour host, explains that the group will separate for two 20-minute sessions through the warehouse and then switch to an interactive water and habitat lab. Afterward, all students regroup for a lively safety discussion and fun time with hands-on electric experiments and activities — things like the energy-generating bike and the hair-raising Van de Graaf generator.
“Not only is the program great for students and an interactive way to support the grade-level curriculum on electricity, it’s also fun for employees from across our organization who participate as guides and presenters throughout the year,” Lofton said.
On one fall morning, utility customer service representative Michelle Beardshear leads 25 kids toward the warehouse. She cautions them about safety, repeating, “We stay between the lines in coloring, driving and in the warehouse.”
Beardshear, an employee volunteer field trip guide for nine years, tells the kids, “Stay behind me, or you might get lost because I’m short!” Then she rolls her wheelchair through the doorway and into the vast warehouse.
“Sort of looks like Home Depot,” she says. “But we only have electric and water stuff.”
After quizzing the group on conductors and insulators, she explains transformers hold 7,200 volts but transfer just 110 volts into the students’ homes. She warns that the high-voltage electricity that courses through this equipment is dangerous to people and wildlife, an ongoing theme during the tour.
After weighing the group on the industrial scale in the floor, always a popular part of the tour, Beardshear leads students into the recycling area. There she challenges the group to guess how much money the utility saves through its careful recycling practices. The answer — $300,000 a year.
In the classroom lab, the students meet Sonya Norton, a graduate of the utility’s Stream Steward program and a volunteer water resources lab teacher for six years. She tells how trees keep the environment healthy and how the utility plants thousands each year along the banks of Clark County streams. She encourages the kids to explain the water cycle to her and then she describes what happens to the dirty water from our homes.
Using a topographic diorama with houses, farms, hills and streams, Norton shows how water pollution happens. Calling for volunteer polluters she has the students step up to sprinkle dirt, a mix of pretend pesticides and herbicides, squirts of oil and sudsy soap across areas of the hilly countryside. “Make thundering noises and we’ll have a big storm and see what happens,” she said raising a sprinkler bottle over the plastic landscape. During her storm, where students make thundering sounds, all the pollutants washed down into the lake. “And that’s how these poisons can damage fish habitat if we’re not careful,” Norton explained.
The tour ends with a “shocking” demonstration of electrical hazards in the pretend town of “Electri-City.” Lofton explains the dangers of electricity to the class and specific ways to stay safe around utility equipment and power lines.
“The takeaway for the kids is electrical safety and how our decisions affect the world we live in,” Lofton said.
Energy Adviser is written by Clark Public Utilities. Send questions to ecod@clarkpud.com or to Energy Adviser, c/o Clark Public Utilities, P.O. Box 8900, Vancouver, WA 98668.
