Oftentimes lost in the destruction of dangerous storms is the hard work put in by so many parties, especially linemen for power companies who never flinch in times of need while putting themselves in harm’s way.
Pearl River Valley Electric Power Association’s Ed Green and Gerald Williamson have been working as linemen for a combined 65 years and described the EF-4 twister that tore through Marion County April 19 as the worst they’ve witnessed in Marion County.
“This is my 34th year, and this is the most violent tornado I’ve ever seen in our area,” Williamson said. “Even the Christmas tornado down here a few years ago was bad, but this thing stayed on the ground longer and was more destructive. If that same tornado would’ve come through down in Columbia, there would’ve been several more deaths. I can assure you of that.”
“We’ve had little tornados but never nothing like this,” Green added. “You see the stuff that happens on TV in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and places like that but not really down here in the South. But it did.”
Following the 2014 tornado, Green said he worked for three days on a six-mile stretch. This tornado touched down in four separate areas and covering a lot more ground.
Between the Easter tornados and the one April 19, Pearl River Valley estimated about 350 power poles were broken in its service area.
“To have two EF-4 tornados hit just seven days apart, you just don’t hear that. Especially that strong,” Williamson said.
He added it’s not just as simple as putting a new pole up because there are right-of-way issues, trees in the way, roads blocked, rain and other obstacles that need to be taken care of first. The first step is making sure it’s safe and the power line is dead before moving on to assessing the damage and coming up with a plan. Williamson said you can’t just start where the most damage is; you have to begin at the source of the power and work outward.
“It’s a complete effort between first responders, supervisors, the state clearing the roads out; it’s a complete effort by everybody before we can even get to the point of building them back,” he said.
What many don’t seem to understand is that their area doesn’t need to be directly impacted to lose power, according to Green.
“People think, ‘OK, it blew through and an hour later we need power.’”
He said with everything connected, a power line going down miles down the road can knock out the power for an entire area. He compared it to links on a chain, saying only one link needs to be damaged to break the entire chain.
Being a rural co-op, Williamson said Pearl River Valley has areas where it has three miles of line feeding just a couple of consumers and others where three miles of line serves 50.
In some areas Pearl River Valley didn’t have a choice but to completely rebuild power poles and lines from the ground up because the damage was so severe.
“Everything was on the ground,” Green said. “There were wires all up in trees, around the trees, underneath a bunch of trees, lying across streets.”
Another aspect that isn’t widely known, according to Williamson, is that the lines aren’t just along the roads. Many of them travel through wooded areas to reach rural locations such as farms, and even with rights-of-way cut out there are 100-foot pine trees that can still reach the lines when they break.
“When a storm like that comes through, I don’t care what kind of right-of-way you got. It’s never enough on something like that,” he said.
Work in those areas can only be done during the day because it would be too dark to see at night without the added light of being near a road. But the linemen were asked to work 16 to 18 hours a day the first few days after the storm and got very little sleep. The goal was to get off around 10 p.m., but if they were close to getting the lights back on in an area they’d stay to finish the job.
“We were trying to work four hours a day, but it didn’t work,” Green joked. “We worked seven days a week from can to can’t. They’d send us home at midnight, and we wouldn’t get home until 1 or 1:30. Then we’d have to be back at 5 or 6 (in the morning).”
He added that a lot of times he’d be scared of oversleeping that he’d just be laying there looking at the clock. The work is dangerous for linemen when they’re mentally drained, but Williamson said Pearl River Valley is really good about letting them stop when they reach that point.
“Since I’ve been here, it’s always been service oriented, and you want to give the best possible service to your consumers as you can,” he said. “That means getting lights back on safely and as quickly as possible, and that’s what we try to do. I don’t want to toot our own horn, but these last two storms within two or three days we had everybody that could take power back on.”
Green said the power line running along Jefftown Road off Mississippi 13 South runs for eight or nine miles and had as much damage as any he’s come across.
“It was just demolished. That’s probably the worst line I’ve seen,” he said.
Green and Williamson agreed they were proud to see the way the community stepped up to help each other with whatever was required.
Green added that nobody complained about the time it took to get power restored but rather continuously rallied together to help their neighbors in need. He said people even brought their own tractors and backhoes out to help clear areas and brought workers homemade meals to the worksites.
“That was pretty amazing to see,” Williamson said. “The churches in the community, that’s what they do. That’s what they’re supposed to do, and they stepped up big time. It was impressive what they did.”
