When driving into an area battered by a hurricane, it’s hard to fathom everything you’ll find. How many trees are down? What’s the extent of flooding? Are roads inaccessible? Are roads still there?
All of this ran through Tipmont linemen’s minds in September en route to Georgia to assist Cobb EMC’s power restoration efforts to nearly 200,000 meters in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
“It’s an eerie feeling when you’re the only one on the road in either direction. You’re really wondering what you’re getting yourself into,” says Adam Crabb, a Foreman at Tipmont. “The saying that it looks like a war zone when you pull up is legitimate.”
Crabb was among eight total Tipmont linemen who assisted in two separate groups, alongside crews from 11 other Indiana electric cooperatives and numerous states. The transmission and distribution infrastructure of America’s electric cooperatives is built to federal standards, so any co-op crew can provide support. The program is known as mutual aid, and Indiana’s program is coordinated by the safety, training, and compliance team at Indiana Electric Cooperatives.
“We live by the seven cooperative principles for a reason, and cooperation among cooperatives being one of them is crucial,” Crabb says. “Nobody knows when it’s their time. Nobody knows when their system will be affected. To know these Georgia crews will have our back at Tipmont if we need it is huge.”
In the first Tipmont group, Crabb was joined by Matt Bassett (Lead Lineman), Christian Guimond (Apprentice Lineman), and Jason Phillips (Apprentice Lineman). Alongside linemen from across the nation, this quartet worked 18-hour days before sleeping in twin-sized bunkbeds stacked three-high in tractor-trailers.
“You’re not getting the best sleep. You’re eating only what can be cooked in mass quantities. But at the end of the day, you have to have a clear mind to do your best and you rely on teamwork,” Crabb says. “Each team has a different skillset. South Central Indiana REMC was there and those guys excel at tree-trimming. They can cut some lumber. Our skillset is rebuilding line. It’s what we do every day and what we’re good at.”
After restoring power to 5,000 people in just three days, the Indiana crews in particular gained a positive reputation among the locals.
“It was nice to hear people say they’d heard about the work the Indiana crews were doing and tell us they were glad we were there,” Bassett says.
Indiana linemen also collectively donated nearly $2,000 to a family whose daughter requires a respirator and other medical devices to survive, which helped them purchase a new generator.
“You’re obviously there to help everyone, but accommodating that specific need to make things easier really stands out,” Bassett says.
After 10 days, the first Tipmont group came home and was relieved by another crew: Brian Brown (Working Foreman), Mason Daugherty (Apprentice Lineman), Dalton Hilligoss (Journeyman Lineman), and Chad Keller (Lead Lineman).
“As humans, we take a lot of things for granted in life,” Crabb says. “Here, you’d see someone at their lowest point. Their home may have been destroyed. Their vehicle may have been gone. You’re there to bring some sort of normalcy. When you watch hundreds of people work together to get people’s lights back on, and when people are hanging out the windows screaming ‘thank you,’ that’s why you do it.”
