We take so much for granted.

You flip a switch, you expect a light to turn on, simple as that. Your phone charges, your microwave reheats your Thai leftovers, your TV shows you the Seahawks having a decent start to the 2024 season.

But imagine the vast infrastructure required to enable that household magic to happen: the ingenuity and hard work and formidable government funding it took to build the dams that generate the power, the organization to see that that power is transmitted around the region, and the sweat and hard work of the workers here in Grays Harbor that respond when drivers or the bad weather of the Pacific Northwest strike at the hundreds of miles of line and thousands of power poles.

In the end, it all comes down to people: people who live here, who work here, who keep the lights on for their families and neighbors.

“Geographically speaking, we are one of the largest districts,” said Ian Cope, communications and government relations director of the Grays Harbor Public Utility District. “We’re pretty widespread.”

Michael S. Lockett / The Daily World Line crews for Grays Harbor PUD guide a replacement pole into position.

Grays Harbor is a vast county, larger than some countries, stretching from the foothills of the Olympics to the coast to the misty hills of the south where it borders on Pacific County. Tens of thousands of poles, any single one of which can be a potential failure point for customers, nearly 2,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines, and 36 substations are spread around the region.

“We are geographically large,” said Craig McAlpin, Lineman and Apprenticeship Committee chair. “We go all the way up to Kalaloch. It might take us an hour and a half up to drive there.”

To cover that region, the PUD maintains five line crews and six service trucks, said Jake Burbidge, the line superintendent, who oversees the crews and servicemen, who are all supported by the central core in Aberdeen: maintenance staff, operations personnel, administration, and the PUD personnel who run the powerhouse itself, overseeing what lines are live and which aren’t.

“It takes all these trades to work together,” said Ben Bouch, the safety and environment director. “All those trades work together to make this all happen.”

The work is variable, just like the weather in the county. It could be pole replacements, or needing to go fix something quickly, regular customer work, or responding to a storm, Bouch said.

Michael S. Lockett / The Daily World Line crews for Grays Harbor PUD replace a pole south of Montesano.

“A typical workday is, the foreman will come into my office, grab the print for the day,” said Gary Forster, the line crew coordinator, talking about the rapidly changing nature of each workday. “I bet maybe one out of 10 days, I get everything set up, (and) it sticks.”

Customer work takes priority, Forster said. What work can and cannot be done is also determined by the weather, said Operations Director Matt Rolow.

“The challenge is to get hot work done. The rain slows you down. Unless it’s an emergency — we don’t do hot work in the rain,” Rolow said. “Weather plays a factor in our ability to move around the system, to access our poles and wires, and to complete the work. The weather really drives our work.”

As the first blustery days of autumn come our way, replacing the placid coolness of summer, that becomes more important. In the winds and currents of the Pacific, the seeds of the winter storms that will rock Grays Harbor are being sown right now.

“Fortunately, we have a pretty good engineering department,” Forster said. “They know in the summer we do bigger jobs.”

With major work being targeted for summer, smaller jobs get banked for the cooler months, where they can be fitted into smaller periods of time. It also means that crews might take up some of those assignments on short notice, Burbidge said.

Michael S. Lockett / The Daily World Grays Harbor PUD Operations Director Matt Rolow looks at the collection of hot sticks in the utility’s possession.

“That’s why you might see a crew pop up at your house without a lot of notice,” Burbidge said, as crews take advantage of good weather to knock out an assignment.

There’s also certain work that’s constantly ongoing, Cope said, such as endless war against plants, pruning back fast-growing trees and other vegetation that could interfere with the power lines.

“We have contractors that do our veg management. It’s on a four year cycle that we try to get everything trimmed,” Rolow said. “We have three Asplundh contractors — those are IBEW Local 77.”

Those powerful storms sweeping in from the darkness of the deep Pacific can hit the coast like a meteor — high winds and heavy rains can bring down trees and poles, knocking out power to vast segments of the county, whose geographical isolation means power can’t be rerouted around a break. The linemen turn out for that, McAlpin said.

“That’s something we take pride in,” McAlpin said. “When we know a storm’s coming, the guys show up.”

Line crews are on call for this at all times, McAlpin said.

“The crew lineman here are on call here 365 days here, 24/7,” McAlpin said.

“Our families, they’re understanding of that, for the most part,” Rolow said.

Michael S. Lockett / The Daily World Craig McAlpin gestures at a transformer diagram at the Grays Harbor PUD’s training center.

The PUD also supports other utility districts around the state when they’re hit with a catastrophic weather event, with line crews volunteering to go assist districts requesting mutual aid for agreed-upon rates for emergency work. The district requesting help pays the crews, such as for windstorms in Snohomish County or snow in Clark County, Burbidge said.

Training

“We can work 40 hours before we gotta take a break,” Forster said. “Then it’s 16 on, 8 off.” Becoming a lineman isn’t a job one just walks into. Once being accepted as apprentices, which can take a few years to begin with, prospective linemen will spend about 6,000 hours working and training in a series of six steps of about 1,000 hours each.

“It’s a big commitment for the person who wants to do an apprenticeship. It’s three years of your life that you’re working your way up,” McAlpin said. “You do bookwork. You have tests every year.”

By the time they’ve completed the six steps of their apprenticeship, they’ve spent time working hands-on doing hot work, anything over 600 volts, as well as plenty of book-work and professional development.

“By the time you get to that step in time, you’re ready,” McAlpin said.

Grays Harbor has a training center on the PUD’s main campus in Aberdeen where apprentices come from all over to train in a controlled setting.

“We’ve had this about five years,” McAlpin said. “We were able to get this because all the other utilities chipped in.”

The curriculum is pretty set, Rolow said, prioritizing safety in a profession that kills the careless.

Michael S. Lockett / The Daily World Line foreman Jason Johnson uses a plumb line to check a newly replaced pole against true.

“First year is getting you used to climbing poles and rigging. Rigging is important in our trade. The second year is all about transformers,” McAlpin said. “There’s a lot to this. It’s all about getting them ready for their fifth step, their turning-hot step.”

A lot of work goes into teaching prospective lineman the use of the hot stick, the insulated pole, generally fiberglass, that line workers use to manipulate the energized lines. Some states allow workers to use rubber gloves; Washington is not one of them, McAlpin said.

“When I work on energized lines, I use this stick as an extension of my hands,” McAlpin said. “Anything you can do with your hands, I can do with this.”

Rolow says the PUD attempts to keep the number of apprentices coming in about even with the number of veteran workers retiring or getting out of the game.

“We’re timing it so an apprentice is finishing their training as that foreman or super is walking out the door,” Rolow said. “There are multiple lineman colleges throughout the U.S. that young people go to as a first step for trying to get exposure to the career.”

There are other union specialties represented at the PUD beyond just the linemen, such as the dispatchers who run the powerhouse, looking over their map of the county speckled with the arcane symbols of their profession. And the profession is always changing; journeyman linemen also use the classroom to stay up to date on best practices, McAlpin said.

“We do a lot of post-training as well. We bring in a lot of journeyman in to re-up on training,” McAlpin said. “Every day, smart people are figuring out stuff.”

The industry has metamorphosed over the years in its approach to the work from the way things used to be, Rolow said.

“The lines and poles and transformers, nothing has really changed,” Rolow said. “But how we approach it is totally different.”

Contact Senior Reporter Michael S. Lockett at 757-621-1197 or michael.lockett@thedailyworld.com.