MARCH SPOTLIGHT
Bob Coffland, Laborer Foreman

Bob is a General Foreman supporting JR Merit’s maintenance projects. This includes a wide variety of work in all kinds of environments, from small maintenance, refurbishment, and upgrade projects in food and beverage processing facilities and industrial manufacturing environments, to refreshing parks and recreation facilities associated with the hydroelectric dams in Washington.

“It’s new all the time, and every day is something different. Yesterday I was at a dairy facility working on their maintenance office, today I’m heading up to a warehouse in Seattle to do some small upgrades. There’s a lot of jumping around,” he said. From tearing down walls to installing structural beams to applying fresh coats of paint, Bob and his small project teams do it all. “And coworker Jeremy Browning, he makes every day super fun!”

Bob got into the construction maintenance industry during high school, working a couple of part-time jobs through a “school to work” program. He was a maintenance/groundskeeper at Ferry County Memorial Hospital and worked for another small company hardfacing mining equipment buckets during equipment repairs at Echo Bay Mines. His father had given him advice that working for the federal, state, county, or city government, or becoming part of a union, were sure routes to a stable job and career. Bob always enjoyed building things, so after he graduated high school, he got involved in union trades.

Asked what he liked best about his work, Bob said it was the variety: “You get to be in all kinds of places and see all kinds of things you’ve never even imagined before. From a trough of chocolate chip cookies or a whole lot of Dorito’s chips, to being up in a river canyon by a dam where no one else gets to go.”

With every project comes the challenges of making an client’s or an engineer’s vision come to life, and finding the right products and materials that are durable and reliable for a variety of different applications. Bob said that lots of preparation and leveraging his experience and lessons learned were keys to success and always delivering a quality product. “And always pick up new skillsets. Especially in maintenance, you never know what you’ll be doing next. One minute you’re working on a simple task and that opens up a can of worms. You gotta be prepared!”

Bob has picked up some skillsets from his JR Merit colleagues and put them to use in his spare time building fully operational model trains! “I’m a laborer by trade and I work with our fabricators, pipe fitters, plumbers, and millwrights. From machining, mechanical, high-pressure steam fitting, and plumbing, I tell them I learned their skillset and turned it into my relaxing hobby at 1/8 the scale!”