Hundreds of people have found work at the new Vestas factory south of Pueblo. The facility manufactures towers for wind turbines. This week, the hundredth tower rolls of the line. Some of the workers there used to be employed by the air conditioner company Trane. Debra Velasquez is one of them. She lost her job when Trane closed down part of its operations.
"I was a machinist at Trane and and they laid off all the machinists there just last year actually and it just so happened that this was a godsend I mean it came up just at the time when everyone was getting laid off over there," she said.
Velasquez knew the lay off was coming. So she applied at Vestas Towers America. A few days after her job at Trane ended, Velasquez started as a cutter at Vestas. Velasquez says she and many of her friends moved to Vestas when Trane made the layoffs.
"At that time there was no jobs around this area so when this place came in, for me and all the other workers who came from Trane who had just lost their jobs from other areas, it was amazing. You could see people coming in with smiles on their faces because they had a job. This is the wave of the future."
Tony Knopp is the vice-president of Vestas Towers America. He talks about the job creation the company brought and why Vestas chose Pueblo.
Interview reported and produced by Shanna Lewis
