BRISTOL, Va. — Last May, some city firefighters sustained minor electrical shock injuries battling a blaze at a house that didn’t have power. They were only able to safely extinguish it after a BVU Authority lineman cut power to the city block.
Authorities later learned the electricity was being pirated in a fire that threatened the entire block.
“Every time they sprayed water on the house, it had aluminum siding, and it would spark up. Two of them had gotten shocked. The fire chief was asking what are we going to do? And I went and killed [the power to the entire street],” veteran lineman Don Duty recalled last week.
“The chief said he appreciated it and I said, ‘I understand. Firemen need heroes too,’” said Duty. “He got a good laugh out of it but a couple of them didn’t think it was too funny.”
Duty, who followed his father into the career, said it was an unusual circumstance for an otherwise routine call. Duty has worked as a lineman for 40 years, still enjoys the work and “dreads retirement” from an occupation historically fraught with danger.
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Electrocution, falls, working in all types of adverse weather and working alongside busy streets are just some of the reasons the profession continues to be listed among the ten most dangerous in the U.S., despite widespread improvement in safety equipment and protocols.
According to national lineman surveys 42 of every 100,000 are killed on the job each year and 2,400 sustain serious injuries, including electrical burns and broken bones from falls.
But if power goes out, they are the cavalry, BVU President and CEO Don Bowman said.
“If a storm hits, there’s no cavalry to the rescue, it’s these guys. We might be able to get some assistance in 16 or 18 hours but that first 12 hours – getting things secure so the public’s not at risk — you’re totally dependent on your local linemen,” Bowman said.
BVU currently employs 12 linemen and three foremen to maintain an electric system valued at $300 million that serves 16,000 customers over a 113-square-mile service area. They operate with about 13,000 power poles.
Their responsibilities also include building out infrastructure for the system and maintaining BVU’s substations.
“You can’t have 40 linemen because there’s not enough work. If you have a storm, you can’t have enough,” Bowman said. “In our region, if we have a storm pretty much everybody else has a storm. We have mutual aid agreements and try to help each other out but where AEP can draw from their own territory — Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio — you can’t when you’re smaller.”
On April 18, BVU is celebrating Lineman Appreciation Day to recognize those workers charged with keeping the power on, regardless of the weather.
“We are immensely proud of our line workers for their service to our community,” Bowman said. “Their unwavering dedication to providing safe and reliable electricity to our customers is evident in the consistent quality of service our customers have come to expect.”
Bowman also credits the efforts of its line crews for BVU receiving another National Reliability Award from American Public Power.
“There’s only 120,000 of these guys in America and if something happened and they all went on strike, life as we know it ceases to exist. If you didn’t have power our food system would collapse without refrigeration. If they do their job nobody thinks about it,” Bowman said.
A great brotherhood
People enter and stay in the profession for different reasons. For Duty, his father worked as a lineman and its about all he’s ever done.
“Dad said don’t follow this line of work, it’s dangerous and it doesn’t pay good,” Duty recalled. But the family lived in Russell County and opportunities were limited.
“There wasn’t a lot of jobs over there except for the coalfields. I worked around the coal mines and that wasn’t the kind of work I wanted to do. I wanted to be outside,” he said. “I got offered a job as a lineman and, in two days, I was working hot [with live electric lines], with an experienced lineman. The experienced lineman would be in a bucket and you’d be on the pole. You mostly assisted him.”
At that time he worked for Pike Corporation, a North Carolina-based utilities provider. After 19 years there, he came to BVU and has worked there for 21 years.
“I came to work here and we do everything coming and going. This is a good team. Anything contractors do, we can do — maybe better. It’s a good team. Everybody works and everybody works safe. Safety always comes first,” Duty said.
Training includes a five-year apprenticeship program and he has helped guide many younger workers.
“I’ve trained a lot of men. You work with somebody, you’ll know within three or four weeks if they’ll make it or not,” Duty said. “You either like the work or you better stay out of it. Electricity is unforgiving, it will either kill you or cripple you.”
Twenty-year lineman Matt Boone chose the career for “the prestige of being able to do something that few people can do. Pushing for that, to be one of the few that gets the lights back on when the power goes out.”
He said the learning curve is substantial.
“It was very overwhelming when I first started because there is so much to learn. It’s a huge amount of information to take in and you’re worried about doing something that’s going to get yourself of someone else hurt,” Boone said.
“It’s a pretty serious responsibility, even for somebody starting out new. Starting out was probably the most difficult point. You start building experience and you start building self-confidence that you know how to do something or handle those situations,” Boone said..
BVU lineman Travis Fletcher of Abingdon also started working for Pike straight out of high school.
“I was on top of the world,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was getting into. About a year into it, I wondered why. It’s a very strenuous job, hard on your body mentally and physically. But after you start, it gets into your blood. It’s a great brotherhood.”
At Pike, he was a storm chaser, braving dangerous weather conditions to restore power after storms and natural disasters.
“I’ve worked in hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms all over the eastern United States,” Fletcher said, adding hurricanes are the most challenging due to the combination of high winds and torrential rain.
“I’ve been through a lot of hurricanes. You go through the eye and then get a second round of it. They always sent us in before the hurricane hit. That way we’d be on standby when the storm did hit, we’d be ready to start working … Traffic was never bad the way we were going. We’d go in convoys of 50 or 100 trucks.”
Working for a local utility provider is different.
“Here you do work because you own the system. There, you just get the power back on and you leave that system. Here you do stuff to make it reliable because you own the system,” Fletcher said.
Safety first
Safety innovations are numerous. Modern linemen typically don’t work with energized lines while on poles and most pole work is done via a bucket truck.
“I’ve seen numerous changes in safety, We free-climbed to the top of the pole. Ten years ago, they came out with fall protection so linemen really can’t fall if everything is done right versus before if you fell you hit the ground,” Fletcher said. “Now everybody wears FR [fire retardant] clothing. Now we have five-point bucket harnesses versus just a waist belt. A lot of great tools.”
There have also been advances in tool technology to create lasting connections that don’t require brute force to squeeze or crimp – while linemen wear sleeve-length heavy duty rubber safety gloves to protect against shocks.
“Some of our guys that’s in their 20s, they’ve never touched hot, off of a set of hooks off a wood pole,” Fletcher said. referring to the climbing devices lineman strap onto their legs. “There is zero forgiveness. You’re on a pole, on a set of hooks, standing on metal and holding 7,200 volts in your hand. I’m probably among the last ones that has done that type of work.”
Whether they’re called out in the middle of a thunderstorm, the aftermath of a tornado, sub-freezing ice and snow or the sweltering heat of summer, they count on each other.
“We have to rely on taking care of each other, watching each other,” Boone said.
That includes providing first aid if a fellow lineman while working up high because EMS workers and firefighters are not certified to be in workspaces with energized power lines.
Restoring power following storms can require long hours but more isolated outages are solved more easily through technology, according to Richard Adkins, BVU’s manager of electrical operations.
“We have circuits all tied together. From an engineering standpoint any circuit can compensate and recover any other circuit if we have an outage, a substation problem, trying to make it easy for everybody’s power to come back on,” Adkins said.
A combination of smart meters, circuit redundancy, and devices in the system called IntelliRupters, its easier to pinpoint and isolate problems and reduce outage times.
“IntelliRupters do it automatically. If there is a car crash or a tree on a line, it will just take that one section out and everybody else is back on, so we know where to look. If we get one, we know where the problem is, we’re not having to drive out eight miles of line looking at every pole,” Adkins said.
Today, Adkins can often isolate the problem from a computer, communicate with linemen in the field to make the repairs and quickly restore the power.
“Unfortunately, I think they do such a great job that they are taken for granted,” said Chris Hall, director of customer operations. “We have such reliability, our customers flip that light switch they expect it to work and that is because of the effort the linemen have put in.”