On-the-Job Experience

Seasoned Linemen Share Lessons From Their Years With South Alabama Electric Cooperative (SAEC)

There are 100 years of experience between linemen Tony Greer, Blane Senn, and Darrell Foster.

In those years, the 3 South Alabama Electric Cooperative linemen have seen a lot on the job — good and bad. April is Lineman Appreciation Month, and April 18 is Lineman Appreciation Day.

In June, service foreman Greer marks his 38th year, while fellow foreman Senn hits 34 years a month later. Foster, an A-class lineman, has a total of 30 years on the job.

Technology has made their jobs easier in ways they never anticipated. Meters are read automatically from the office. Trucks are bigger, taller and equipped with iPads for work orders. Poles are also taller, and linemen still climb poles several times a week, compared to the 7 or 8 times a day in years past. Fall-prevention safety equipment makes the climb a little slower for older linemen who didn’t learn how to climb with the equipment from the beginning.

“The new guys that have learned to climb in it at lineman school — they climb wonderfully in it, but we still have a little trouble with it,” Greer says.

Safety gear has improved over the years. Along with hard hats, linemen wear fire-retardant clothing, steel-toed boots, safety harnesses for climbing poles, safety gloves, gaffs — sharp, pointed climbing spikes made specifically for utility poles — and rubber sleeves.

“They’re hot, mostly in the summertime,” Foster says of the rubber sleeves. “I don’t mind putting them on in the winter as much because it’s cold.”

While lineman classes were available when they started, most of the training for seasoned linemen like Greer, Senn, and Foster happened on the job.

“We had some old-school foremen back then who really put your nose to the grindstone, and they tried to see what you were made of,” Greer says.

It wasn’t unusual for new linemen to be hired in the summer to see how they handled the heat.

“By then they knew exactly what they had if you made it through the summertime,” Senn says. “If you’ve never done this work during the summertime, it can be rough.”

Joining the SAEC Family

Both Foster and Greer joined SAEC thanks to the influence of longtime lineman Nathan Madison Jr., who died in 2022 after nearly 50 years with SAEC.

Greer’s father ran the repair shop at a Chevrolet dealership that serviced Madison’s SAEC utility truck. Greer, then in high school, washed the truck after it was serviced and got to know Madison. When Greer graduated in 1987, Madison encouraged him to apply for a job at SAEC, and 2 weeks out of high school he began working at the cooperative.

Foster was related to Madison, and about 7 months after Foster graduated high school, Madison encouraged him to apply with SAEC.

“He came over to my mom and dad’s house and asked me about getting a job out here, so I filled out an application — me and some more guys — and he called me 1 night and told me, ‘I think you might have the job,’” Foster says.

Sure enough, Foster was called for an interview and hired.

Working in All Weather

Foster works on the construction side. His crew sets the poles and builds new distribution lines. Greer and Senn work on the maintenance side. But when a storm blows through the service area, they all come together to keep the power on.

January’s record snow was a breeze compared to the 1993 blizzard.

And no storm has yet to compare to Hurricane Opal in 1995, the 3 linemen say. The hurricane made landfall in the Florida Panhandle, causing a swath of damage extending into Alabama and Georgia. The entire SAEC service area was without power for around 36 hours.

Linemen worked 14 days straight, 12 to 16 hours a day, following Opal. There were more than 300 extra linemen and over 150 trucks to help repair the damage to the system.

Utility work can be dangerous, of course. Foster, Greer and Senn have all fallen down a pole.

But Senn survived the most dangerous risk of the job — 14,000 volts of electricity shot into his left hand and out of his left foot. It happened in February 1996, the day after Valentine’s Day when Senn proposed to his wife. He had never feared electricity before that, but he has a healthy fear of it today. Senn considers himself lucky to have survived and often shares the experience with new linemen so they’ll understand the reality of what could happen.

“When you’re young, you always think nothing is ever going to hurt you; you’re going to be just fine,” Senn says. “It doesn’t take but just a split second for that to change your outlook or attitude toward it. At the end of the day, I just try to get the guys working with me back home.”