Electricity is easily taken for granted – for the average American, their interaction with it only goes as far as flipping a switch to turn on the lights, or waiting for it to come back after an outage. In the background, an army of over 100,000 linemen work day and night to keep America’s power on, and to restore it when it goes out.
One team of linemen serves at Kankakee Valley REMC, working to ensure their over 18,000 member-consumers across eight counties have the electricity they need to power their days. That means an early workday for people such as Jesse Webb, a journeyman lineman and crew leader for KV REMC.
“Us crew leaders get up in the morning, hear our orders, and push our crews out to the job,” he said. “We’re the large scale maintenance, we change, repair, and replace the poles, bury new wires, all that kind of stuff.”
Webb is the man you see in a bucket, dozens of feet up, covered in protective gear as he works on a power line, installing a transformer, or doing any number of repairs to an aging power pole. It is dangerous, complex work that requires thousands of hours of training and studying to perform safely and correctly every time, and avoid the falls, shocks, burns, and other injuries that carelessness can cause.
“When you get started, they send you to apprenticeship school,” he said. “That’s four years and 8,000 hours of on-the-job training and between 3,000 to 4,000 hours of classroom bookwork. As you go through those four years, you get more and more involved in the day-to-day here at KV REMC.”
Webb himself did not have any experience in the industry when he got his start, but he knew people who worked for KV REMC. None of their stories quite prepared him for learning the amount of work involved in making sure the power stays on.
“My mind was blown, you just don’t realize how much goes into flipping that light switch on,” he said. “You drive by all this stuff and think, ‘electricity: bad, don’t touch.’ We all know that, but until you get into this world you just don’t see how many pieces and parts go into making all of that work.”
Webb recalled being in the same position as every other American when the power goes out – frustrated and impatient as he waited for it to come back.
“What we take for granted and what it takes to get the power back on when it does go out is just mind blowing,” he said. “I was the first one to say, ‘Oh great, the power’s out, how long is this going to take?’ Now I know it’s not just going and flipping a switch to get it back on, it’s a complex system that makes everything go round and round.”
Veteran linemen like Webb spend hours of their days and weeks maintaining that complex system from midair in their truck’s bucket. You would expect it to be physically draining, getting bounced around by the wind while doing arduous repair work – but Webb says the bigger drain is often mental.
“Complacency is what will hurt or kill you,” he said. “When you’re up in the bucket, you have to think about every single move you make. When your head is between three different wires and they’re all 7200 volts, turning your head, raising your arms, or moving your bucket is all thought out and planned, and that’s before you even get to the ‘work’ part of it. There’s days that I don’t come home physically tired, but I’m just mentally exhausted.”
There are other unique elements to the job – such as weekly ‘on-call’ days where a lineman needs to be available to respond to an emergency at a moment’s notice.
“There’s a sense of pride knowing that if I’m making a call in the middle of the night, someone is going to answer the phone and help me,” Webb said. “There’s a lot of camaraderie, and it says a lot about the urgency of the linemen and groundmen that work here to get our member-consumer’s power back on. We get good feedback from them and take a lot of pride in that. It’s why we have to live within 15 miles of the shop.”
All of the studying, planning, energy, and late nights spent up in the bucket is worth it to Webb because of the feeling he gets when a job is done.
“It’s about going out and building something, then driving past it and telling your wife and kids, ‘we built all of this, none of this was here before us,’” he said. “Or going out in the middle of the night, throwing a fuse in and seeing every light on a street come on, it’s a great feeling. I just fixed that, I got these member-consumers back in power. That’s what we’re here for, to keep the power on.”
To learn more about Kankakee Valley REMC, visit www.kvremc.com.
