High places and hot wires, and he loves it.
Published in: The Oregonian
Date: 1/16/2006
By: Gail Kinsey Hill
–Rain drips from ashen skies as Pacific Power lineman Pat Winter, 45, pulls a harness over well-worn orange rain gear, hauls a drill and auger bit toward one of the company’s bucket trucks, and signals for a hoist up alongside a power pole.
It’s midmorning, and he’s connecting a new apartment complex on Northeast Cully Boulevard to the city’s electric power grid. A long, wet day lies ahead — up close and personal with high-voltage lines, conductors, transformers and a perpetual Portland drizzle.
Despite the weather, Winter’s job satisfaction is anything but sodden. Damp or dry, he’s in his element, maintaining the network of poles and wires that keeps the lights on for the utility’s 69,700 Portland-area customers.
No time clock, no desk, no button-down collar. Feel sorry for the poor slobs under cover, not the linemen, says Winter, who smiles as if he were sitting in the catbird seat, not standing in a wet metal bucket.
“While they’re in some building,” Winter says of his cubicle colleagues, “we’re outside.”
Of course, there are moments he could do without. Like the time about a month ago when a car plowed into a power pole on Columbia Boulevard. “Snapped it right off,” he recalls.
Winter and his crew worked from midnight until 6 p.m. the next day repairing the damage. “It can be exhausting,” he admits. “We can work 30, 35 hours straight before we take a rest.”
And it can be dangerous. “Hazardous,” he corrects. “It only gets dangerous when you don’t pay attention.”
Winter’s lapse in focus came about 10 years ago. He was working on a de-energized power line high above the ground and had grabbed a wire to begin repairs.
When he cut the wire, he inadvertently removed the ground, exposing himself to the electromagnetic field of a parallel 230,000-volt hot line. He immediately became caught up in the induction; his muscles contracted like hundreds of slammed doors.
He was able to jerk one hand off the wire. “But I couldn’t get the other free,” he said. “I couldn’t move.”
A foreman, on watch below, jumped to the controls and swung the basket sideways, ripping Winter clear.
Pinhole-size burns dotted his thumb where the current had entered his body. Silver dollar-size marks seared the exit site on his thighs.
The scars have faded, but the lesson remains. “Never be complacent,” he says, “even if you’ve done it a hundred times before.”