News Article

Simulator reduces training time


1/21/2003 4:05:31 PM


Employees of Corner Brook Pulp and Paper were recently trained on College of the North Atlantic’s mechanical harvester simulator. From left are Louis MacDonald, forestry training instructor with the college, mill employees Calvin Rideout and Dennis Biles, Chris Elliott, a forestry trainer with OnTrac, and at the controls is mill employee Everett Warford.

January 21, 2003 - A small bead of sweat forms on Everett Warford’s brow as he slowly moves his mechanical harvester toward a stand of trees directly in front of him. This is the former logger’s first time operating the Timberjack harvester, a $750,000 piece of equipment, but he’s not overly nervous - it’s only a simulation.

In December, Warford and six other employees of Corner Brook Pulp and Paper were trained on College of the North Atlantic’s Timberjack TJ3000 Mechanical Harvester Simulator.

Chris Elliott, a forestry trainer with OnTrac, a national company that sells and provides training on heavy equipment, has helped a number of loggers make the transition from chainsaw to harvester. He says operators used to need approximately 1,500 hours of training on a harvester before being able to use one in the field. Simulator training, he says, can reduce that by up to 500 hours.

“Before this technology, we had to sit people down and explain everything to them and then put them in a machine and let them go. With the simulator there’s no fear of them making a mistake – it’s much safer, and because they are not actually in the woods it’s better on the environment.”

Elliott says new mechanical harvesters actually do very little damage to the environment – when in the hands of a competent operator – and are better than falling trees with chainsaws and having them hauled out by skidders.

“The harvester has large tires that allow it to float on the forest floor. Also, as the trees are limbed, the limbs fall in front of the wheels along with the tree top and it creates a brush road for the harvester to drive over,” says Elliott.

Another new machine, called a forwarder, then comes in behind the harvester, using the same brush road and driving on the same wide tires, and loads the limbed timber and carries it out.

“When the brush is cleaned up, you’d have a hard time believing anything was ever in there – except there’s a bunch of trees missing,” says Elliott.

Louis MacDonald is a forestry training instructor with the college. He says approximately 90 percent of the wood currently being used in the province’s paper mills is cut by mechanical harvesters.

“And it’s not only in this province. The need for trained mechanical harvester operators is world-wide – there are jobs available in other parts of North America, South America, and all over Europe,” he says.

It is because of this world demand that College of the North Atlantic is exploring the possibility of offering a one-year mechanical harvester operator program, in addition to the short-term contract training currently being performed on the machine.

“Because the simulator is mobile, we have been doing short-term training all over the province – in Roddickton, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Stephenville – but the simulator has a lot more capability including the ability to do forest landscaping, 3-D modeling, and so on. We are already talking with people at the Geo-spatial Research Facility located at Corner Brook Campus to see how we can partner with them,” says MacDonald.

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For more information contact:

Stephen Lee
Communications Manager
(709) 643-7929

or

Tanya Alexander
Public Information Officer
(709) 643-7928