The calm before the storm
A day in the life of Meade County RECC lineworker Kody Sheroan
The morning before the storm dawned gray and cool, a quiet prelude to the long night everyone knew was coming. When Meade County RECC lineworker Kody Sheroan, 30, arrived for work, he checked supplies on the troubleshooting truck—a 10-ton vehicle with a 55-foot boom. He calls it the trouble truck, and at any moment, he can tell you exactly how many meters, bolts, LED pole lights and insulators line its meticulously organized bays. He met with his supervisor, Joel Taul, to review the day’s jobs, completed the routine vehicle inspection and rolled out to work a few minutes before 7:30 a.m.
The trouble truck has a two-man troubleshooting crew—Sheroan and Taul, who have worked together for three of the 12 years Sheroan has been doing linework. They get along, which Sheroan says is lucky, because they spend more time together than they do with their families. They have each other’s backs in ways big and small. Sheroan has taken over Taul’s on-call week, in addition to his own. When Sheroan has had a long night on call, Taul, who typically drives the truck, lets him sleep in the passenger seat between job sites. The only thing they disagree on, Sheroan says, is the temperature in the truck—Sheroan prefers it cooler, but Taul likes to run the heat.
The day’s first job was quick. Sheroan and Taul pulled into the homeowner’s driveway to troubleshoot a low voltage issue. Taul took a reading with the voltmeter. It was 251 volts on the top side; a little high, but within the acceptable range, and certainly not too low. After he pulled the meter, Taul found the problem.
“See where that insulation is bubbled up?” he said, pointing out the problem area. Likely caused by a loose connection, the issue was on the homeowner’s side of the meter. It would have to be fixed by an electrician, but Taul had a recommendation—a local guy both men knew.
Sheroan knew the homeowner as well. Most weekends, he takes his young son, Kade, to breakfast at Drane’s Kurve Inn in Hardinsburg, and they usually see the homeowner there. He always gives Kade quarters.
On the road again, Sheroan drove past homes, barns and fields stubbled with last year’s corn. “There’s no traffic out here,” he says. “The people are nice. I’m from here, and nine times out of 10, I know them.”
Sheroan grew up in nearby Custer, attended Custer Elementary and Breckinridge County High School and completed lineworker school at the Southeast Lineman Training Center in Trenton, Georgia.
Growing up, Sheroan and his two older brothers didn’t play sports—they worked with their dad, who drilled into them the importance of a good work ethic. Sheroan says he learned how to operate an excavator when he was 10 years old.
“Some kids would say, ‘That sounds boring. I’d rather be playing baseball,’” Sheroan says. “I was having more fun learning all those skills that my dad taught me.”
He likes to tell people he became a lineworker because, as a kid, he hated being at home when the power was out. He figured if he was the one turning the lights back on, he’d never have to sit around waiting for someone else to fix it.
After high school graduation, he worked for the family business, Joe Bennett Backhoe, and then at the Domtar paper mill in Hawesville. It was easy work, and it paid well—but it was the same thing every day.
“If I’m not learning something new every day, I’m bored,” he says. Linework offers a continual mental challenge—especially troubleshooting, which he compares to building a jigsaw puzzle. And there’s always the potential for an outage, which can smash up your plan for the day and force you to start over. The work changes constantly, and he loves it.
Essential materials include tiny hard hats for kids, who are always fascinated by the 10-ton truck. Photo: Joel Sams
The biggest misconception lineworkers fight, Sheroan says, is the assumption that restoring power is as simple as flipping a switch. In reality, it can take hours just to find the source of a problem, and sometimes even longer to access it. A pole near the road might be an easy fix, but a pole just 10 feet further away in muddy conditions could be the difference between a one-hour and a five-hour outage.
And then there’s the order of restoration. Sheroan compares the electrical system to a tree. The substation is the trunk, feeders are the main branches and tap lines are the twigs.
“If you lose a branch, you’ve lost both the branch and the twig,” he says. “And if you lose the trunk, you’ve lost it all. There’s no reason trying to glue the twig back on if the tree’s on the ground.”
Sheroan keeps a meticulously organized truck, ready for troubleshooting all over the cooperative’s six-county service territory. Photo: Joel Sams
While he drives between sites, he’ll often get a call from his wife, Andrea, if he doesn’t call her first. On days that his kids, Kade, 5, and Kara, 2, are home from day care, he’ll try to find a moment to have a video call with them, as well. He decided years ago that he wouldn’t be like the lineworkers he’d worked with in the contracting world who called home from far-flung job sites, “raising their kids from the back side of a cellphone.” When Sheroan goes home at the end of the day, he’s in family mode. That time belongs to his kids.
One early morning, Sheroan was putting on his boots at the back door, getting ready to respond to an outage, when he heard the patter of small feet. Kade had woken up and come running.
“Dad, where are you going?” Kade said.
“I’ve got to go to work, buddy.”
They had the typical back and forth, Sheroan says—“Can I go with you? When are you going to be home?”—but he reassured his son that he’d be back soon and sent him to bed. He sat in the truck for a few minutes after that, updating the outage map and thinking about the risks and responsibilities in his line of work. Having kids makes it harder for him to walk out the door.
“You need to be safe anyway, but that is the biggest reminder of why,” Sheroan says, reflecting. “Because I just told him I would be back in a little bit. I have to make sure that I’m back in a little bit.”
Good weather seemed to be holding. Daffodils, forsythia and Bradford pears bloomed along the route to McDaniels, where the trouble truck’s next job was a line drop. The homeowner, Scott Yount, had hired three men to cut down a large dead tree in his backyard. Directly in its path was the service line, which connects the transformer to the home. Taul removed the home meter, ensuring there was no load on the transformer, and Sheroan disconnected and dropped the service line.
While the tree crew worked, Sheroan and Taul moved on to the next site—a light installation on Edgewater Lane. At first, the bucket couldn’t reach the pole. Taul repositioned the truck, backing up within 3 feet of an outbuilding. Sheroan hollered from the bucket when it was close enough. Six minutes later, a new security light was on the pole, and the trouble truck was headed back to McDaniels.
When they arrived back at Yount’s house, the crew had the tree on the ground and were busy chunking it up with chainsaws. As Taul and Sheroan carefully backed the truck into the driveway—Taul standing behind the truck for safety—another visitor arrived from next door. Two-year-old Lucas Yount, Scott Yount’s grandson, wanted to see the action. Sheroan, already prepared for his young observer, gave him a mini hard hat with the Meade County RECC logo. Taul showed Lucas how to use a switch on the back of the truck to raise the outriggers, stabilizing the truck on each side before Sheroan raised the bucket. Lucas beamed and grinned before his mom, Megan Yount, hustled him away to a safe distance.
Sheroan loves moments like this, especially during storm responses, when he might barely see his own kids for a week. “Stuff like that gives you your spark back,” he says.
The trouble truck had one more job before lunch—another service connection. Sheroan and Taul call it a “squeeze-up.”
Sheroan says his wife, Andrea, and children Kade and Kara, are his most powerful reminders to put safety first on every job. Photo: Kody Sheroan
Lineworkers share a language all their own. A pot is a transformer. A can is also a transformer. Then you’ve got your hardware—top hats, nut covers, chicken catchers, potheads, booties and popsicles, to name a few.
Sheroan claims that one lineworker can recognize another from a mile away. It’s not the same as being in the military, he says, but there’s a bond that’s hard to describe—the brotherhood, the camaraderie, the way they give each other hell, but have each other’s backs when it counts.
“We’ve been through some pretty wild stuff together,” Sheroan says. There are moments of danger, like the time lightning shattered a tree about 30 feet from him and Taul. And then there are the more personal bonding experiences. Taul was the first person Sheroan told when Andrea was expecting their first child. He was riding with lineworker Joe Brown when he found out his grandfather had died.
“The community you get as linemen, the brotherhood, it’s something special,” Sheroan says. “We’re mean to each other. But if they call and need something, you go. It’s a trust thing.”
Somehow, the trouble truck made it through the day with no outage calls. The jigsaw puzzle of routine work across the co-op’s six-county service territory was nearly complete. Bad weather loomed ahead, but Sheroan took a wait-and-see approach. Sometimes he’d rather not know the forecast—it messes with his sleep.
The last job of the day was another squeeze-up. At the site, Taul raised the outriggers to brace the truck on the damp ground, downhill from a trailer and a metal outbuilding. Sheroan buckled into the harness, shoved his arms into the gloves and grabbed the shotgun stick, an insulated fiberglass tool. The bucket climbed smoothly and swung toward the transformer. He pulled an old light off the pole and rapped the conduit sharply, knocking out mud dauber nests, before attaching an LED fixture. Meanwhile, Taul had pulled off the old meter and was ready to set a new one. They spoke in monosyllables, working in unbroken rhythm.
“Good?”
“Yes.”
Taul looked up at the sky, where a lone buzzard wheeled against the sodden gray. “Wind’s calming down,” he said. “Calm before the storm. That’s a bad sign.”
Sheroan extended the shotgun stick. A few twists, a smooth motion, and the transformer was connected. Taul smacked the meter into place and sealed it. Sheroan tested the light, flashing it on, then off. The bucket descended.
When he got back to the co-op, Sheroan restocked the truck, preparing for the storm he knew was coming. He was on call that night, and every night for the next week and a half. Come rain or shine, he would be reliable.
Andrea would have to pick up Kade from day care, he said, watching the clouds stack up. The sun broke through for a moment, throwing long shadows, then vanished again. The wind was rising.
Taul and Sheroan complete a “squeeze-up,” or new service connection, near Rough River Lake. Photo: Wade Harris
Sheroan was cooking a pot of jambalaya at 7:30 p.m. when he got the call. As forecast, high winds hit the cooperative’s service area, and dispatch had just called in the first outage of the night. Sheroan wasn’t surprised. Outages don’t wait for dinner. They don’t wait for birthdays or T-ball games, either. He has learned to leave meals half-eaten and conversations unfinished. He keeps a cot in the locker room at work, where he often catches his last few winks before dawn. It’s all part of the job.
The first outage was simple—just a tree limb snagged on a power line. But when the full force of the storm hit, around 9 p.m., Sheroan knew he’d be out the rest of the night. Lightning strobed the driveway of Sheroan’s home in Custer, where he’d parked the trouble truck. He threw a spare flame-resistant shirt over the center console and slid into the driver’s seat.
The wind had snapped several poles, causing scattered outages across the service territory. One pole, near McDaniels in Breckinridge County, sprawled across a driveway, trailing power lines. It was just one of the urgent repairs. Four of the Hardinsburg district’s 11 lineworkers responded that night. At one point, two crews changed poles in different locations.
It was early morning when the last lights flicked back on. Sheroan crawled into his cot in the locker room around 3 a.m. He could still snatch a few hours of sleep before the next day’s work began.
