Hurricane repair no holiday for linemen
STORY AND PHOTOS by Jim McCarty
On Oct. 28, Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica with an unprecedented fury. Concrete houses had their roofs torn off. Lesser structures made from wood were blown off the map. In the fishing port of Black River, boats were hurled miles inland, coming to rest upside down in the marsh. Mudslides and downed trees blocked roads, slowing the emergency response. Hospitals closed and schools were too badly damaged to hold classes. Churches seemed to bear the brunt of the hurricane’s wrath, as if the daughter of the devil himself was named Melissa.
As the floodwaters receded, Jamaican officials surveyed the damage. They found three-fourths of the island’s residents were without electricity. Worse, transmission lines carrying electricity from power plants were leveled by the storm. One of those people taking stock of the situation was Detommie Fuller, the person tasked with finding mutual aid for the nation’s power supplier, Jamaica Public Service Co. She was in Houston, Texas, when the hurricane struck but quickly returned to Montego Bay.
What she saw was heartbreaking. “Everything was flat,” she said of the power grid. That’s when she made a call to Ingrid Hunsicker, senior program manager with the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association International Program. From Ingrid the call went out for volunteer linemen to help restore power in Jamaica. In December a group that included Palmyra-based Northeast Power lineman Cole Pennewell spent two weeks working in the area around Ocho Rios.
Since 1962, NRECA International has helped bring the benefits of electricity to developing countries around the world. In 2016, Missouri Electric Cooperatives set up a statewide international program that has since built lines to power thousands of people in Bolivia and Guatemala for the first time.
Missouri On a Mission, as the group is called, was scheduled to return to Guatemala in December 2026. Instead, its leader, Craig Moeller, offered to forgo that trip and instead focus on Jamaica. “We are the Show-Me State,” Craig says. “Show us the outage, and we will show up.”
He quickly had the names of eight volunteer linemen from six Missouri electric cooperatives willing to help restore power on the island: Rodney Braddy and Jacob Tiefenthaler from Cuivre River Electric; Chris Turner and Colton Stickferd from Black River Electric; Joe Lay from Lewis County REC; Eric Peeper from N.W. Electric Power; Jared Kelley from SEMO Electric; and Alex Buschjost from Three Rivers Electric.
Up for a Challenge
This was the third international program trip for Jared. He says he’s always ready for an opportunity to meet people from another culture and help them better their lives. “I’m always up for a challenge, and these trips are a challenge,” he says. “They’re hard work, but it’s very rewarding. I feel like we made all the difference that we could. We did turn some lights on, and I can lay my head down at night, knowing that we did make a difference. And we gave hope to the Jamaicans there.”
The team entered the fray on Jan. 12, armed with just the tools they could pack into linemen drag bags. After an extensive safety briefing from JPS staff, they headed to the Black River area where they met up with Canadian contractors who had been on the job for close to a month.
“Where are your trucks?” the Canadians asked.
“We don’t have any,” they were told.
“Are you crazy?” was the response.
Those neighbors to the north soon learned respect for their American counterparts as they began climbing poles and hanging heavy “tree wire,” their term for plastic coated cable an inch thick that had to be hung from the cross-arms on 40-foot poles. Normally wire like this would be stretched from wire trailers and hung with bucket trucks.
Lacking these tools, the Missouri linemen first tried flopping the wire off the reels and dragging it along a busy highway. When that caused kinks in the wire they switched to rolling the 3,000-pound reel down the side of the road, peeling off wire and hoisting it by hand.
The strain of that first day had Black River Electric’s Colton questioning the wisdom of volunteering for the project. He related that he had never worked this hard in his life. “I didn’t advertise it, but that first day took a lot of getting used to,” added Cuivre River’s Jacob.
Slowly but surely, wire started appearing on the bare poles. As the men worked off hooks under the cloudless sky with the temperature around 90 degrees, huge dump trucks roared past hauling debris from the demolished structures in Black River.
In his daily safety briefing Craig listed the dangerous roadway as the No. 1 risk, followed closely by lines that could be energized from generators heard droning in the background. No strangers to storms, these co-op linemen took no chances, wearing fluorescent safety vests and grounding every line and testing them for voltage before climbing the pole.
As they worked people stopped to thank the men. Word began spreading about these volunteers who left home and family to help make life better for the storm’s victims. The linemen also heard stories of the hurricane’s wrath.
One 9-year-old boy told them he was home from school because it was a “rainy day.” His school had no roof, he said, so rain poured in. He related how his family rode out the storm: “The hurricane, it was very terrible. Our house now, I don’t even know where to start. I made a prayer: God please let the storm stop.”
A woman told a similar story: “When it started there was wind and rain and it was like it would never end, more is coming. Trees falling, roofs going, a crazy experience. When I saw the roof going, I moved to the other side of the house and watched the roof just go off. Our house got flooded. It’s something I don’t wish anyone to experience and I don’t ever want to experience that again.”
As the linemen worked, leapfrogging from pole to pole, women sold shrimp harvested from the Black River at roadside stands. A man working from a store cobbled together from storm debris had apples for sale. Before the storm he had a wealth of island produce to sell.
“It’s a new beginning for me. I don’t have much to sell, no breadfruit, no mangos, everything is gone. So, Melissa has taken me back to square one.”
The work got easier after Craig convinced the JPS employees the Missouri crew needed a small truck to haul tools and materials and a tractor with a front-end loader to help unreel the wire. The linemen became fast friends with Chris, their truck driver, and Oral, who brought his backhoe into the effort.
Doing the Impossible
When they moved to hanging smaller neutral wire it seemed the wire flew onto the poles. “It was all the same stuff we do at home,” Jacob says. “We just had to do it off hooks. And we came up with new ideas just to be able to get the job done. You give us an impossible job with no tools and equipment, and we figure out how to do it.”
Now hope grew with those residents of the small communities where the men worked. One man told the Missouri crew he thought it would be a year before he had power. He was one of the lucky ones who saw the lights come back on, three months to the day since the hurricane struck.
As the men reconnected a well, a man planted seeds nearby. He related how the field was once thick with pumpkins and papaya trees. The man pointed to two tiny plants sprouted from his seeds. “We have hope,” he said.
Those who took part in the Jamaica effort will return home changed for the better. They will be better linemen for the challenges they faced. If past projects are any indication, they will emerge as leaders at their electric cooperatives, with many stories to tell of their adventures in a foreign land.
Email Jim McCarty at jmccarty@ruralmissouri.coop.