You never think about them until your power goes out, and there you are left alone in the dark. You may not believe it but linemen and powerline technicians are also garbage men. These tradesmen have to go out in all kinds of weather to repair, maintain, and even replace all the power lines in every city, including yours. You can find them inside the buckets high at the top of the tree lines, you can find them scaling poles down the roadways, but what you don’t see is how committed they are to not just their jobs, but the proper care of the piece they work with daily. Powerline technicians make sure they use every salvageable part and repair what they can to eliminate the amount of parts that lead to the landfill.
Linemen do a wide variety of jobs. Replacing blown out transformers after a massive storm, rewire power line cables after a tree has fallen on them, as well as recycling parts are among just a few of their duties. When a wooden power pole becomes a hazard, the linemen evaluate it and dispose of it properly. Unlike just any ole’ log, power poles are distinctive and have to be cut up and afterwards handled with special care because of the initial treatment the wood goes through before being placed in the ground. Some utility poles are made of steel as opposed to traditional wood. Linemen are responsible for helping maintain these poles and are an active part of making steel the world’s most recycled material.
Linemen are high soaring examples of recyclers. Aside from recycling power poles, they also are leading the industry in recycling and repurposing wire, cardboard and steel. When new wire needs to go up after that windy storm, linemen safely take down the old existing lines and splice them and sort the metal to be melted down and repurposed and the insulators get sent to a separate facility and potentially reformed. From the parts they use to the boxes they come in linemen climb their way to being top examples of recycling.
