CenterPoint Energy & National Energy Foundation Team Up for Energy Safety Education

(KNSI) — CenterPoint Energy is continuing its collaboration with the National Energy Foundation to promote the Energy Safe Skills program.

It is an energy safety education program available at no cost for secondary, vocational and college students. It covers characteristics of natural gas, natural gas leak recognition and response. It also teaches the importance of practicing the call before you dig mantra of dialing 811 and safe digging best practices. The training includes an interactive presentation and quiz supplemented with STEM-based activities.

Shane Alexander, Director of Damage Prevention and Public Awareness at CenterPoint Energy, explains the goal is to “provide safe digging education to those individuals who are on the cusp of joining the construction, engineering, and maintenance industries.” Alexander adds that students learning and understanding how to “safely design, plan and work around buried utilities is critical to these students’ personal safety on the job and their success in their future careers.”

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

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