Joe Burgess and Serena Lambert give a very different name to the term “pilot”, with the ladies playing an important role in the construction of some of Australia’s biggest windfarms. Sarah Harman caught up with the pair to find out about their unique roles. Picture: Carmel Zaccone
TRANSPORTING equipment the size of an Olympic swimming pool through steep and rugged terrain is no easy feat and requires precision, particularly when your cargo is worth tens of thousands of dollars.
For the past decade Wentworth friends Joe Burgess and Serena Lambert have been doing just that, jumping from state to state working on some of the country’s biggest windfarms.
“We’ve gone from Portland to Adelaide, there was a lot of work in Newcastle and we’ve just finished our longest project in Cairns where we worked for 12 months,” Ms Burgess says.
Known as pilots, the women are the eyes and ears for the truck driver that leads the convoy of vehicles working to get the enormous wind turbine parts and driver to site in one piece.
“It’s steering them down the road, around corners, through towns, around obstacles, which we call furniture, it’s a very big job and very stressful,” Ms Burgess says.
“We’re at the back of the load in another vehicle and I’m in contact with the driver giving him directions.
“The load is so long quite often the driver is already around the corner but the back of the load is not in his view.”
On their last project, working on Queensland’s largest, $360 million Emerald Windfarm, transporting just one blade took 9 hours from Cairns to the site return.
“The blades are the longest parts, they can measure over 50m and the generators are about 125 tonnes so a piece of equipment combined with the weight of a truck could be 250 tonnes.”
Ms Burgess says she has “seen some sights” while on the job, referring to what both her and Ms Lambert agree is the worst part of the role, impatient drivers.
“We’ve seen everything, cars clipping other cars and running off the road in a rush to get around us,” Ms Burgess says.
“We once had a driver who tried to drive under the trailer (which had a turbine on).”
Despite the convoy often including police escorts, the pair say drivers still pull some very risky stunts, making an already challenging job even more stressful.
“It can take a long time to learn to be a steerer because it is very difficult,” Ms Lambert says. “You just have to get it right because if you break a blade for example, it could cost $20,000 to repair, you can’t scratch anything.”
However both women admit they do not want to do anything else, with each day completely different to the one before.
“It’s funny because when you first go to a site there’s nothing, you just see this big mountainous range,” Ms Burgess says.
“And when you’re finished you think ‘wow, we did that’, which is a good feeling.”
While the pilots are barely at their Wentworth homes during projects, they say the company they work for has its priorities right.
“We try to get back every six weeks. Work is very family orientated so if we have to go, we go,” Ms Burgess says. “My son and his fiancée had a baby in August and as soon as she was born I got on a plane and came straight home.”
Ms Burgess will soon head to Townsville to finish a job before both women wait for the call saying they are needed to start a new windfarm in Tasmania, with construction due to begin at the end of the year.
