Key Takeaways:
For decades, the boiler room was a place of quiet expertise.
Tucked behind the walls of hospitals, universities, manufacturing plants and commercial buildings, it was staffed by seasoned operators who had worked their way up through the trades.
These individuals brought technical knowledge to the role. Their operational intuition included an ability to recognize when something was off by sound, vibration or subtle shifts in performance. These professionals understood how systems behaved under stress and how to correct issues before they escalated.
As these employees retire, they take that knowledge with them. In many facilities, responsibility for boiler systems is now falling to individuals with limited exposure to the equipment they are tasked with managing.
Further complicating matters, facility managers now navigate a more complex landscape.
The result is a growing disconnect between system complexity and operator preparedness; one that is surfacing in reliability, safety and overall operational continuity, according to Jon Kapel, CEO of Steamworks, a company focused on boiler training and consulting.
“The number of near misses and accidents in the boiler industry over the last 10 years has increased,” Kapel says.
Those incidents are common and occur in the types of facilities that facility managers oversee. In fact, over a 10-year period, there were 9,588 incidents involving steam-heating boilers, 6,928 involving water-heating boilers and 4,311 involving high pressure boilers, according to ACHR News.
Additional data from the National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Inspectors reinforces the underlying issue, finding that nearly 40 percent of boiler-related deaths and accidents are tied to human error or poor maintenance, further underscoring the critical role of operator training plays in system safety and performance.
“Even though our safety controls have increased, so have our accidents,” Kapel adds. “Research into these incidents have determined the root cause for this is a lack of operator training or knowledge or competency.”
Kapel blames the training gaps on a shift away from licensing and certification for system operators.
The challenge is compounded by a patchwork of regulations across the country. Only about 10 states require boiler operators to be licensed statewide, while many others have no formal requirement at all. For Kapel, that inconsistency creates a wide variation in how operators are trained and how prepared they are when something goes wrong.
At the heart of the issue is not just a skills gap, but a workforce imbalance.
“It’s a numbers game,” says Ronald Boidi, a professor at Maine Maritime Academy, which trains boiler operators and engineers. “We have a larger population that’s retiring, and a smaller number of people in school to replace them.”
This means there are fewer experienced operators in the field, and not enough new entrants to replace them. And where facility managers once pulled experienced electricians or plumbers into these roles, those trades also have a labor shortage.
“We need electricians. We need plumbers. We need all those skilled trades, so we can’t pull from them,” Kapel explains. “So now we need the 19-year-old who is new to the profession and also inexperienced.”
This shift is creating a workforce where new entrants and career-transitioning employees start with limited familiarity with boiler systems. “Both of those groups are equally disconnected from the steam world,” Kapel says.
For John Glynn, a veteran boiler trainer and former inspector who has spent decades working in and teaching the trade, the contrast between past and present is stark. His own introduction to the field reflects a time when learning was immediate and immersive.
In 1975, Glynn progressed through licensing levels while gaining hands-on experience across multiple facilities. Today, as an instructor working with technical colleges and private organizations, he sees that more foundational training is needed to bring operators to baseline competency.
While modern boiler systems are equipped with advanced safety controls, those systems are not a substitute for operator understanding. Many times, the consequences of insufficient training are not immediate failures, but a gradual erosion of reliability that leads to costly disruptions.
For instance, Kapel says a boiler may stop operating for safety reasons. This means there’s no more heat in the building, which disrupts activities within it. Then, what should be a routine interruption becomes a prolonged outage because operators lack needed skills to diagnose and respond appropriately.
“Maybe the boiler could have been on in this example, because all the technician had to do is hit a manual reset that he didn’t even know existed,” he adds.
In facilities where boilers support critical operations, those delays can have far-reaching consequences. Boidi summarizes the stakes succinctly.
“It’s life and property, right? And business continuity, right?” he says.
Glynn offers a practical comparison between facilities with continuous operator presence and those without. “It is safer to have trained people and a licensed engineer there all the time. If something goes wrong, we can respond to it right away,” he says.
Without the ability to respond immediately, even minor issues can escalate. Glynn recalls incidents where unattended systems failed entirely because no one was present to intervene.
“I know of one operation where a boiler overheated and melted down on a Sunday, and the boiler was destroyed,” he says. “Fortunately, nobody got hurt.”
For facility managers, these examples emphasize a key point: automation might cut down on daily work, but it doesn't negate the necessity of expert monitoring.
Ronnie Wendt is a freelance writer based in Minocqua, Wisconsin.
The Boiler Operator Knowledge Gap Is Becoming a Safety Risk
