Dear Members and colleagues,
We’re all a few weeks into the social distancing and working from home (if you can) and we hope you’re all keeping yourselves and your families safe. It’s so important that we continue to follow the clinical and governmental advice to ensure we dampen down the COVID curve.
Today is Corrosion Awareness Day, a day intended to highlight the estimated US$2.5 trillion annual cost of corrosion worldwide (3 to 4% of GDP of industrialized countries). This is a cost that reflects the fact that many decision-makers in industry and government still do not fully understand the consequences of corrosion and how vital our work in its control and mitigation truly is.
At the ACA we have undertaken many changes since our professional lives were significantly altered in mid-March. But our efforts to educate, connect and support the Australasian Corrosion community continue, and we’d like to update you on some of our most recent activities.
Our ability to conduct our face-to-face training courses has ceased, so the team worked tirelessly, led by IT manager Robert Slater, to turn one of our classrooms at head office into a studio.
From this studio, we have begun running our NACE CIP1 and CIP2 courses online. We are calling these ‘blended’ courses – two days in the classroom and the remaining three days to be scheduled at a later time. We are not far away from being able to host NACE CP3 and CP4 course also. Lead lecturer Justin Rigby delivered the first blended CIP1 course from the Melbourne offices to 13 colleagues on Monday and Tuesday of this week. The ability to deliver these courses online is an exciting development for the ACA in these times. It will be interesting how blended and face-to-face courses interact in the future.
The ACA also hosted its first two public webinars, starting with an interesting presentation from Peter Wilson on Managing Corrosion Using Integrity Operating Windows, taking place last week, and our Working through COVID-19 for the Corrosion Industry Guest Panel this week. A big thanks to all of our panellists, and the 60+ colleagues who zoomed into the conversation, or followed along on our Facebook page.
For anyone who missed out on attending and wants to catch up on the webinars, these webinars and many of our futures webinars will be free to view for all ACA members in our new webinar library, coming very soon.
Our Events Coordinator Lachlan Sebbens has been organising and coordinating these Zoom meetings and webinars – we have more scheduled, with Dr Ian MacLeod and Dr Graham Sussex presenting a webinar each next week.
Many of you would have seen that we have postponed this year’s ACA C&P2020, which was scheduled for Perth in November. While this is a very disappointing decision, it was the right one to make for our Association. We can guarantee you that C&P2021 in Perth will be worth the wait!!
The ACA annual general meeting will be held in late May, again, this year via a Zoom conference. More details of this meeting will be coming next week.
Finally, in keeping with the global nature of World Corrosion Awareness Day, we’ve got some international corrosion content to share with you. EUROCORR is hosting a Corrosion Awareness Day Webinar on Corrosion and Low Carbon Energies that takes place tonight.
Dr. John Scully, editor of CORROSION and one of our esteemed keynote speakers from last year’s International Symposium has published a fascinating free article THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC, Part 1: Can Antimicrobial Copper-Based Alloys Help Suppress Infectious Transmission of Viruses Originating from Human Contact with High-Touch Surfaces?.
Finally, for those interested in presenting at NACE’s CORROSION 2021 Conference, abstract submission is still open until May 21.
A reminder that the ACA team can still be contacted on (03) 8608 7901 or via email.
Our best wishes to you all,
Dean Wall
Chairman
Richard Reilly
Chief Executive