It's my job: Lineman for Entergy

My name is Larry Edwards, and I’m a journeyman lineman for the Madison County office of Entergy Mississippi. I’ve worked with Entergy 11 years.

I live in Yazoo City, where I grew up and graduated from Yazoo City High School. After high school I started working on power lines for the Yazoo Valley EPA. I worked there from 1993 until 2004, when I came to Entergy.

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My parents had a friend who was a lineman for Yazoo Valley, and I grew up knowing about power line work through him. I had done some welding but knew I wanted to try something different. Ever since I’ve started doing this I’ve really liked it.

Our work is different every day. One day we may be in a new neighborhood that’s going in, digging holes and laying a lot of underground and overhead power lines. The next day we may be building a major line and the next day we’ll be at one house out in the country, or we may be fixing a pole that a car got wrapped around after a wreck.

We build (lines for) new construction and do a lot of maintenance work on existing lines. The poles have “birthmarks,” or stamps that are burned onto them, that tell their size and when they were manufactured. I’ve seen some that go back as far as 1962.

I cover all of Madison County from County Line Road to the north, almost to Carthage; on the south, to Clinton; not quite to Edwards going west on Mississippi 22; and, going east, to the Ross Barnett Reservoir.

One thing that’s really changed in the 22 years I’ve done this has been the equipment we use and the trucks. They’re a lot better than when I started in ’93. The trucks now have hydraulic tools — hydraulic drills and wenches and augers — that make our work a lot easier.

But we still do have to climb some poles. Every lineman still has situations we can’t get the trucks to. For the new guys, climbing the poles is one of the first things they have to do, and we still have to qualify every year — we have to do a “pole rescue” and carry a 200-pound dummy down a 40-foot pole. We also have first aid and CPR training.

Safety has come a long way, too. At Entergy, safety is the No. 1 thing. It’s important that the job is done right and in the safest way, even if it takes a little longer. We have safety meetings every Monday, and on every morning of the week, we’ll have a 5- or 10-minute safety talk before we start.

Things change during the year as the seasons change. School gets out, traffic patterns change, ticks are out in the summer. We adapt to all of it.

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The weather affects our job tremendously. In real inclement weather, we can’t do much. But if we got a little spooky every time there was rain, lightning and thunder, we’d never get anything done. We have to work in the cold, but you warm up a lot when you get moving. It’s what we have to do. In the summertime, it’s hard to cool off. We have to wear flame-retardant, long-sleeve shirts, rubber gloves that come all the way up to our elbows, long pants and work boots. It gets pretty hot in the summer.

In bad weather, we get called out to help Jackson, Rankin County and Clinton all the time, and they help us. For hurricanes, ice storms or tornadoes, we may need to go over to Arkansas, Louisiana and east Texas in the Entergy network to help out. Out of network, we may go to Missouri, New York, Kentucky, Virginia, Florida — anywhere. They call, we’re going.

Just about every year we travel for some type of storm, and I really enjoy that work. You get to know linemen all over the place — Jackson, Clinton, Rankin, maybe people you trained with, and you only see them when the storms hit. It’s like a big reunion. Your whole routine is changed.

It’s really, really, gratifying to go to a town where everything is out. There is so much satisfaction in seeing a town coming back to life when the lights come back on. You get treated like royalty. Little kids bring us crayon drawings to thank us. It’s a really humbling, gratifying job, helping these people who are so happy you are there for them.

There are so many things I love about my work. I like going into places that are devastated and being a really small part of something really big. The linemen get a lot of praise, but there are so many people behind the scenes. There are lots of logistics people who keep the wheels rolling — getting hotels or finding us a place to stay, providing the meals, setting up tents and community washers and dryers. Coliseums and civic centers become small cities inside. It takes way more than the linemen you see up on the poles. Those people don’t get anywhere near the credit they deserve.

I’d say the biggest challenge of my job is to get it done and get it done safely, but actually I’m more afraid of crazy traffic and getting hit by a car by somebody on their cell phone than I am of what I do once we get up there!

I think everybody has a tough job, but for me, I think this job is what I’m cut out to do.

— As told to The Clarion-Ledger