This is a story that hasn't completely played out yet. It is a personal experience, of my life and traumatic injury in the power line construction industrie. I hope that this piece can shed light on the daily struggles that line workers and their family's go through, to provide everyone with the ability to have the electricity that we all take for granted on a daily basis.
I want to start with a statement that I tell people all the time. "I love the work, but I hate my job". I will explain a little later what this statement means to me. I work in the contractor world of power line construction and maintenance. I began my career in 2010 for a power line contractor out of Richmond VA. When I started for this company, I started at the very bottom. I came in as a ground man, making $13.30 an hour. A ground man is basically a laborer that assists the lineman who are working in the air with their daily task. When I started, they were working 11 days straight and 3 days off. At 20 years old, I had never worked any overtime to that extent. These guys had been working 12+ hours a day since the job had started. It didn't take me long to find out what real physical work actually was.
I seemed to catch on to the work very quickly. The department of the company I was working for was called the transmission department. This department worked on all of your big high voltage lines that you see, ranging from towers, to large steel poles, and smaller wood poles. The job that I was starting on was 27 miles long and it was worked on overtime the entire job. The job inevitably went from 11 days on and 3 days off, to 7 days a week until the job ended. I started climbing and erecting towers about three months after I started. I worked hard and by the end of that job, I had become a lineman apprentice and was working in the air pretty frequently. My lineman that I was apprenticing under was an amazing lineman. He was highly respected and considered by most to be the best lineman that we had. From years of working together, we became really good friends and are still close to this day.
As lineman, we leave our family's every week to go out of town to a job that almost always works long hours and is extremely physical work. It involves a lot of climbing and ariel work at extreme heights. Not everyone is cut out to be a lineman. This is where my opening statement of "I love the work, but hate my job" comes in. I love being a lineman. I love working at extreme heights and climbing. I love the hard work and feeling of accomplishment that I have at the end of the day. I love getting called out for storm work, working extremely long hours, day and night, to get people's power restored. Having people come out and clap for you as you come into town, and bring you food and drinks as you work through the night, is such a good feeling. Seeing people so happy to see their lights come back on is amazing. Even though that there is so much that I love about being a lineman and the work that comes with it, I absolutely hate the job. I hate packing my bags every Sunday night to leave early Monday morning. I hate seeing the look of sadness, as my wife makes food for me to have while I'm out of town. The sadness is a combination of knowing that she's home alone, with no help at all raising our son, to the stress of knowing that I could possibly never come home. I hate looking at my son and knowing that the next time I come home, he will look older and be doing new exciting things. The feeling of missing out on seeing him grow up everyday is horrible. I hate hearing the alarm go off Monday morning somewhere between 1:30am and 2:30am, to drive 4 hours to work. Even though I hate all these things about the job, my wife and family understand my love for what I do, and would never try to force me to do something different.
Fast forward from my first job in 2010, to a completely different company in 2017. I had worked my way all the way to being a 1st class lineman and a leader on my crew. I had become a very respected employee and was relied on heavily to do a lot of the work. I eventually got tired of all the traveling. The lineman that I came up under as an apprentice, had gone to another company a couple years prior and was able to work at home. He lived in Greensboro, NC and all of the work that he did, stayed in that area with in driving distance from his home. He had been trying to talk me into coming over there to work for him, because he had been given a foremans position and was running his own crew. After much contemplation, my wife and I decided that I should go to work with him in Greensboro. Our plan was, that I would go to work there and after getting settled in, we would uproot our family from eastern NC, and move to Greensboro. By doing that, I was hoping that I could continue to do the work I loved, but be able to come home every night and be with my family. This is where the story takes a turn.
I had been at this company for about two months. The power company that we were working for called and said that a fiber optic line had been been damaged on some towers near where we were working and wanted us to stop the job we had been on and take a couple weeks to pull in new fiber optic. In order to pull in new fiber optic, the old fiber needs to be removed. Before we could start the process of pulling in the new fiber, we began going through and doing what we call "un clipping" the fiber. We had been climbing the towers and doing the work for a few days, when our company called and said that they had two cranes rented that we could use with a man basket to finish the work. They wanted to do the work faster, so we went and got the cranes. We set the first one up on the afternoon of April 6th, 2017. The tower we were working on was about 140' tall. We knew that the crane would not reach the tower itself, so we added in the additional piece to the boom of the crane called the "Jib". I was the first one up to run the crane. I was the lead man on the crew, so they wanted me to be the one to do the work out of the crane basket. I asked my crane operator if he would run the crane for me from the ground and he hesitated and said "get Roy to do it". Roy was the lineman I came up under that was now my foreman. So I asked Roy, "do you mind running me from the lower controls". He said " just get the wireless remote control and run it from the basket". I said "I would rather have someone run it from the ground". He eventually convinced me to run it with the controller, so I grabbed it and got in the crane basket. At the last minute, an apprentice ran over and said "do you mind if I go up with you?". I said no, and he grabbed his gear and got in the basket with me. We started on up in the crane basket. As I was operating, I was constantly trying to get a feel for these new controls. I had never ran a crane basket, but I had ran many different bucket trucks and lifts at the prior company I had worked for. We got to the top of the tower where we needed to be, and we went to work. We got about half way through and I realized that they hadn't loaded a piece of material in the basket that we needed to complete the job. The wind had began blowing pretty hard and I didn't want to drop out my hand line rope, because of the chance of it blowing into another adjacent powerline. I began to scope the crane boom in and as I got out away from the tower a good distance, I began to rotate away, Into a clear area so I could start my decent. Talking to the apprentice who was with me, I began my decent. The boom began to drop fairly fast because of my unfamiliarity with the controls, but I didn't want to let go because of the whipping affect it would have on the boom. As I continued booming down, I heard the guys who were on the ground start yelling. I immediately let off of the controls. The boom began to bounce. As I looked behind me, that's when I realized that the front of the crane had come off the ground. The crane was falling...there was nothing I could do now. It started over slow, like a table chair tipping over backwards. Once it got to the mid way point, we began our free fall. All I can remember is bracing for the impact as the basket hit the ground. We were immediately slammed to the bottom of the basket. As I layed there on my back, all I could here was the screaming of the apprentice behind me. I immediately tried to sit up and realized I couldn't. All I could think was "my back is broken". I also realized that my right ankle and leg were broke very bad. I struggled to breath, still hearing the continuous screams of the young boy in the basket with me. The rest of the crew rushed to the fallen basket to try and help us. We were both begging them to get us out of the basket, in between our screems from the pain. Someone yells from a distance "don't move them!" As the guys scramble to find a way to comfort us as we layed there in pain. The short time frame it took for the EMT's to arrive, seemed like hours for us. They arrived and immediately worked to get us out and into the ambulance. The next few weeks were the hardest weeks of our lives. Multiple surgerys and constant pain as we both layed in a hospital bed, unable to move or do anything for ourselves. We are lucky to be alive. The final investigation shows that we fell at free fall for about 40-50'. We are extremely blessed that we didn't have any brain injuries. I ended up breaking my right leg in two places and completely crushed my ankle. I had to have an external fixator on my leg and plates and screws in my ankle. I fractured my back in three places and fractured six ribs at the spine. Both my lungs were bruised, which caused me to cough up blood for a couple weeks. Some how my left leg made it out with just a broken toe and some heel bruising. The next year of my life is going to be much different than I had planned.
So as you sit in your house, watching tv, looking through social media on your computer, and texting on your cell phone, please don't take those things for granted. There are men and women that risk their lives every day, to make sure that people can have electricity and internet service without interruption. There are many in this profession that do go to work that one last time and never come home to their family. Line work has always remained in the top ten dealiest jobs and for good reason. I happen to be one of the lucky ones that had a catastrophic injury and lived to tell about it.
