It’s National Lineman Appreciation Day

Today is National Lineman Appreciation Day, but that doesn’t mean the men and women who maintain our power grids get the day off.

On Monday afternoon, Georgia Power linemen Ricky Mount and Aaron Bush were in the parking lot of the National Infantry Museum, installing electrical service so the museum can hold events out in the lot.

Mount, 27, has been a lineman for Georgia Power for about seven years, after completing a two-and-a-half year training and apprenticeship period.

Mount said he enjoys his job, in spite of some drawbacks, because “I like to work outside. It’s a good job that’s interesting and it pays well.”

According to the Northwest Lineman College, there are 115,000 linemen in the U.S., making a median wage of about $65,000, which does not include the considerable amount of overtime they work. They service nine million miles of power lines strung along 170 million utility poles.

Of those poles, two or three get knocked down in Columbus by bad or impaired drivers every weekend, Georgia Power spokesman Robert Watkins said. The worst days for utility poles are the major holidays such as Christmas, New Year’s and the Fourth of July, when people might celebrate too much.

Mount said the most dangerous part of the job isn’t necessarily dealing with 25,000 volts of electricity running in the lines atop utility poles.

“It’s invisible,” Bush laughed.

Mount said working in and driving through rainstorms, ice storms and in the wakes of tornadoes and hurricanes are the most dangerous aspects of the job.

And linemen are on call 365 days a year for that kind of work, whenever and wherever they’re needed.

“These guys come in at all hours of the night, whenever there’s trouble,” Watkins said. “They can be told, ‘Come in tomorrow and pack enough clothes for two weeks. We don’t know exactly where you’re going, we don’t know when you’ll get back, but we’ll wash your clothes if we need to.’

“They may go from one place to another, for example, working their way up the east coast. We’ve gone as far as New York City.”

During Hurricane Sandy, 30 of the 50 linemen that were qualified to work on the underground grid in New York City were from Southern Company.

During Hurricane Katrina, workers built a tent city just for visiting linemen, where workers slept in hammocks strung between poles and had to use portable showers.

“They had the main system back up in just 12 days, with thousands of people working on it,” Watkins said.

Asked if he worked in the Katrina aftermath, Mount laughed and said, “I was still in high school.”

This story was originally published April 18, 2016 at 3:41 PM with the headline "It’s National Lineman Appreciation Day."