A day in the life of a lineman
The second Monday in April is set by state statute as Lineworker Appreciation Day in Missouri. To see just what these dedicated workers do to deserve our respect, we spent a day with an electric cooperative lineman. Join us on the job with Laclede Electric Cooperative journeyman lineman Charley Moore.
7:20 a.m., Laclede Electric Cooperative Operations Building, Lebanon: It’s 40 minutes before his workday officially begins, but Charley Moore and most of the other linemen who work for the co-op are already at the office. Charley downs a can of Monster Energy and eats a quick breakfast of biscuits and gravy from Hardee’s, then joins his fellow linemen in some early-morning banter. They weigh the odds of winning with a scratch-off lottery ticket, discuss the chance the changing weather will bring outages and generally give each other a hard time. Promptly at 8, the scene shifts to the “show-up room” where district operations supervisors Kenny Ruble and Phil Menley give the crews their marching orders. It’s organized chaos as the men head to their trucks, the deep rumble of diesel engines shaking the garage as the crews head into the field.
It was a long journey to the top of a pole for Charley. The veteran lineworker recalls what launched his career 19 years ago. Charley was working for the Durham Co. in Lebanon, which makes metal boxes used by electric co-ops to house meters and other electrical equipment.
“I kind of got lucky I guess,” he says. “My father-in-law was a boss there. The HR lady was good friends with him and said, ‘Hey, if you know any young men who are looking for a good job, Laclede Electric is hiring.’ She let me use her as a reference and I got an interview. That was in 2005. I knew nothing at all about being a lineman.”
He would soon learn what it takes to keep the lights on for Laclede’s 29,000 members. He started out on the ground floor, so to speak, as a laborer. “You can’t do anything but dig holes and get this and go get that. You do that for six months and then you become a first-year apprentice.”
Laclede Electric has its own four-year apprenticeship program leading to journeyman status, which it runs with support from the Association of Missouri Electric Cooperatives. These days the co-op’s apprentices typically come from one of the lineman schools such as State Technical College of Missouri in Linn or Ozarks Technical College, with schools near Laclede’s Lebanon office and in Nixa.
Their education continues on the job and also through classes at the association’s training center in Jefferson City. Prospective linemen often decide whether they want to continue based on the weeklong climbing school. It’s here many face their first make-it-or-break-it challenge: pole climbing.
Charley will never forget his experience there climbing 35-foot poles. He had practiced at the co-op, but never got above 5 feet off the ground. His training came in the days when linemen free-climbed poles, without the benefit of gear that prevents falls.
“It was tough,” he says. “I was 28 and not in good shape. It didn’t come naturally to me. And it was before the fall arrestors. So, if you fell you could hit the ground.”
That’s what happened on his first climb. “I cut out and fell and got some splinters in my arm and I’m like, ‘Man, I don’t know if this is for me or not.’ I wasn’t scared of heights at all but when you have a quarter inch of steel holding 250 pounds on a pole it’s just hard to get used to that. It was just, ‘There’s no way that’s going to hold me.’ ”
Fortunately for Charley, the experienced instructors at the school had been there themselves. He recalls Darrell Cuppy, a safety instructor for AMEC, and Craig Moeller, then a lineman for Three Rivers Electric Cooperative, helping him build his confidence.
“Craig just climbed up the pole with me and talked me through what to do,” Charley says.
Back at Laclede, armed with newfound confidence, Charley again ventured up a pole using those tiny spikes attached to his boots. “I thought ‘I got this’ and then the very first pole I climbed after leaving climbing school, I fell. I came down about 15 feet and I caught the pole before I hit the ground.”
That’s when Charley discovered the character of the people he now worked with. They were determined not to let him fail. “From that time to the next time I climbed it was a little nerve-wracking,” he admits. “Luckily, they made me climb every opportunity we had. They made me go up and it just gets you used to it.”
8:20 a.m., Laclede Electric Operations Building: Charley and his on-call partner, Adam Smith, clean out the bed of their Dodge RAM bucket truck. Their work orders call for hanging new lights, wiring a service to a warehouse and fixing an automated meter that isn’t reporting its readings.
Charley’s phone rings and their day quickly changes. The two are working a weeklong shift as on-call servicemen. That means when something goes wrong for a member, it’s their job to fix it. They head east of town to a mobile home park to check out a low-voltage issue.
Before this and every other job they do begins, they hold a tailgate session. As the senior worker, Charley leads the discussion that includes what the job entails and any potential risks. Safety comes first. That done, the two pull the meter and test the voltage. There are no issues on the co-op’s side of the meter, so Charley knocks on the door and lets the member know the problem is inside her home.
There are two things linemen do that scares the general public. The first is working high above the ground. The second is working around high voltage. Linemen don’t fear either one. “It’s not that you’re scared of it, but you respect it,” Charley says he was taught. “You are always aware of where you are at, whether you are in a bucket or on the pole. I’m always looking up and around, before I use my cutters or move my arms at all.”
Training and classwork helped, but the real lessons came from his mentors at the co-op. They instilled in those under their wings a culture of safety. The idea is everyone goes home to their families the same way they came to work in the morning.
“You learn from these older guys as you come up, and I try to do everything safely,” he says. “Because I’ve got younger guys under me now that are learning. You’ve got to be a good example because they say the first two years of your career is when you really learn your safety habits.”
10 a.m., near Lebanon: Back in the truck, Adam drives while Charley navigates to a warehouse in an industrial park near the city limits. A Laclede construction crew has been here earlier, setting a pole and the three-phase transformers. They set the outriggers on the truck and Charley climbs into the bucket while Adam sorts out the wires and marks them so Charley knows where they go. The two, partners for more than a year, work together like gears in well-oiled machine. When the bucket carries Charley to the top, he has everything he needs to complete the job.
Both men wear PPE, or personal protective equipment. For Adam that’s fire-resistant clothing, safety glasses and a “safety yellow” hard hat. Charley adds rubber gloves and sleeves designed to protect him from the 7,200 volts that flow through the lines he’s working on.
There are two groups of linemen working at electric co-ops. One focuses on construction or upgrading lines. The rest are service linemen, troubleshooters who fix problems that crop up or perform maintenance. They work out of two-man trucks equipped to do any task except setting poles. For that another crew will be called in with a digger-derrick truck.
When it’s their turn to be on call, Laclede’s servicemen work shifts starting at 4:30 p.m. on Friday and continuing until the next Friday. That means they must be ready to go any hour of the day or night.
“On service you can leave here and just fix lights all day,” Charley says. “Or maybe do a service upgrade like we did this morning. Some days it’s super slow and some days you don’t stop until late at night.”
When their phone rings, no matter the hour, the service linemen have 20 minutes to respond. “We can get called in at 3 a.m. and then work on until the next morning. That happens a lot,” Charley says.
He says his wife, Jessica, worried about him at first. “She’s scared to death of storms anyway. When it’s storming, I’m not usually home. We’ve got an app on her phone so she can wake up and look and see that I am still moving. And she can go back to bed. It makes her feel better.”
10:40 a.m., near Long Lane: Charley and Adam share a lot of windshield time covering the huge area Laclede’s Lebanon office cares for. They drive 45 minutes to a rural home that has three meters, a long trail of dust billowing in their wake. Here they hang a device that communicates with the meters, then relays the information to the office.
It’s Adam’s turn in the bucket. When he’s done with the installation, Charley calls the office and reports the meter readings and location numbers. As they work, strong winds pick up as promised by the weather report.
Linemen miss a lot. Birthday parties, graduations and family meals all take a back seat when the call comes in from dispatch and they head out to fix another outage.
“My daughter got married in October,” Charley recalls. “When she planned it, I didn’t have my on-call schedule. I was actually on call. So, I had to trade. Most of the time the guys will trade so we don’t miss things. But you do miss some. I actually missed my daughter getting baptized. I’ve missed birthdays.”
The trade-off is the knowledge that you helped others, he says. That’s especially true on the big outages like the ice storm that hit southwest Missouri in 2007. It was Charley’s first big storm. “I think I worked 39 and a half hours straight before we got to go home,” he says. “I’m like, ‘What in the world did I get myself into?’ ”
He’s worked hurricanes in Louisiana and most recently a major windstorm in Kentucky in 2023. “We’re getting to help people,” he says. “It’s neat. Like we got a trailer park on that was out for two weeks. We got the power on and the whole trailer park lit up. Everybody was whooping and hollering and screaming.”
2:20 p.m., near Phillipsburg: After a quick lunch the phone rings again and the two are off on another long drive for their next job. As the wind picks up a member reports blinking lights. They inspect the meter and find everything in good shape near the home. Now they turn detective and troubleshoot the source of the problem. Charley finds it at the transformer. A fuse is loose.
He goes up in the bucket to attach a truck ground to the neutral wire using a hotstick, another safety step. Then he can make the repair. When this job is complete a similar problem is called in. This time the fix is harder to find. Adam changes the meter for the member, and they tell him to call back if the issue continues.
Laclede Electric’s linemen frequently change roles so they can do any task sent their way. That’s important for when major outages take place and it’s all hands on deck.
“I’ve always enjoyed service work more, because it just seems like my day goes by faster,” Charley says. “But they’ll rotate us so we’ll do construction where you set poles and do conversions. We can all do everything.”
Linemen work in all kinds of weather, from balmy spring days to the scorching heat of summer and below zero days like the past January brought. “The hardest part is keeping your hands warm,” Charley says.
He adds that linemen are encouraged to take breaks to avoid frostbite or overheating. “They are really good at taking care of us. If you are doing too much and overheating or getting too cold, it’s really on you,” he says.
3:40 p.m., west of Lebanon: Wind gusts are pounding the area now and the inevitable happens. A tree located outside of the co-op’s right of way breaks and falls across a line. Several homes are without power.
Charley and Adam join another crew searching for the problem. They find the downed line near a pen of cattle. Before repairs are made, they climb a fence and do a “lock out, tag out” on the breaker that controls this line. This ensures any crew that follows knows someone is working on the line.
They get the limb off and the line straightened out so Adam can splice it from the bucket. Before he comes down, he trims back some limbs and fixes a kink in the line that could become a future issue. They pull their warning tag off the pole and kick in the breaker using a hotstick. The breaker holds, so this outage is over.
It’s 6:30 p.m., past the normal quitting time, when Charley and Adam complete their last job of the day. This one takes them back to Long Lane where they fix another wind-related problem that has caused a line to sag.
They head for home, knowing it could start all over again before morning comes.
