What It's Like To Be... with Dan Heath
Curious what it would be like to walk in someone else’s (work) shoes? Join New York Times bestselling author Dan Heath as he explores the world of work, one profession at a time, and interviews people who love what they do.
What It's Like To Be... with Dan Heath
A Lineman
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Wiring a neighborhood back to life after a tornado, coveting the work of helicopter linemen in Faraday suits, and surviving the collapse of a rotten utility pole with Elden Rivas, a journeyman lineman in Houston, Texas. What is the one sound on the crew radio that stops every lineman cold? And why does a squirrel on a transformer mean easy money?
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Elden Rivas was in the middle of nowhere. He's an electrical lineman and he was replacing an old utility pole. Before he could put up the new pole though, he had to do a bit of work on it.
Elden:And so I was framing this pole, drilling holes through it with this auger and this drill.
Dan:And he's working off a blueprint, which can be kind of complicated, and he's reading it and he makes a mistake.
Elden:I messed up. I was drilling like, oops. No. It's supposed to be two foot above, not one foot. And so I had to redrill it. And so I climb up the old wood pole. I'm up in the air and and I noticed on the wood pole, the old one that was on, I saw these lines. And this pole, back in 1962, whoever was drilling this had made the exact same mistake I did.
Dan:1962. Now, how did you know it was that old?
Elden:It has a birthmarks on it. Yeah, every wood pole has like a a stamp on it.
Dan:Okay.
Elden:And this dude made the exact same mistake.
Dan:That is wild.
Elden:And I'm like, oh my goodness. Our industry is a revolving door.
Dan:Yeah. Do you ever leave marks for the linemen of the future?
Elden:I do. I usually carry a little sharpie with me and I put a smiley face.
Dan:Just to brighten someone's day in the future.
Elden:That's my little... It's my signature.
Dan:I'm Dan Heath, and this is What It's Like to Be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, a welder, an audiobook narrator, a hospice nurse. We wanna know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Elden Rivas what it's like to be a lineman. We'll talk about why squirrels are a lineman's best friend, what it's like to deal with the aftermath of a terrible storm, and what's the most daring work that a lineman can do. Stay with us. When you flick a light switch in your house, the electricity that's powering that light has been on a kind of miraculous journey. A journey made possible by Lineman. It starts with a power plant.
Elden:Let's imagine a hydro plant that's generating a 100,000 volts.
Dan:Just for some context, your typical wall outlet in the US is a 120 volts.
Elden:And so we have these 100 mile lines of transmission that goes to a substation. These substations have these very, very large transformers and these transformers step down the voltage to, let's say, 7,000 volts.
Dan:Okay. So the substation steps down a 100,000 volts to 7,000 volts, but that's still way too much for your house's electrical panel to handle.
Elden:So these 7,000 volts go to these transformers.
Dan:And the transformer, just just to pause there for a second, the transformer are like those gray, almost garbage can looking things hanging on the poles?
Elden:Exactly. They vary in sizes depending on how big of a neighborhood. And they also become underground, so you see like a green cube in your backyard. That's a old underground transformer. We call them pad mounts.
Dan:The transformers are packed with coiled copper wire that steps the power down to a voltage your house can handle.
Elden:And then from there, that goes to your breaker box, and from your breaker box to your outlet, to your light switch, and that's it. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing, Dan. The normal person can just flick a switch without ever happen to worry about whether it's gonna turn on or not.
Dan:And we just utterly take it for granted. I mean, the magnitude of this, I mean, what what do we have? A 100 or a 125,000,000 households in the country and essentially every last one of them has electricity? And it's not like, you know, setting up a wireless network or something. I mean, every one of those means like somebody ran a wire to your home
Elden:Yep, a lineman.
Dan:Across the country. Imagine if we were starting that today. Like, it takes twenty years to expand a highway. Like, how long would it take if we didn't have any electricity today to...? It would take a hundred years and $10,000,000,000,000, like, it's amazing what we've accomplished.
Elden:And we've been doing it for over a hundred years, about a 130, 140 years.
Dan:Do you ever think about that first generation of linemen?
Elden:You know, I'm a union member. I'm proud union. IBEW, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The IBEW was formed in 1891 by 10 linemen because in 1891, one out of two linemen were dying on the job.
Dan:Oh my goodness. And so they had to fight back and fight for standards, yeah?
Elden:Fight for standards, fight for safety. They were powering the nation, they were creating something that has never been imagined before.
Dan:So just from an outsider's perspective, it seems like you would have three kinds of work, like installing or replacing lines, doing maintenance on lines, whatever that might mean, and then repairing lines when something goes wrong like like in a storm for instance.
Elden:Yes.
Dan:Are there any other lanes or are those the three main lanes?
Elden:Those are the three main lanes. And and the thing is there's different types of linemen. There's utility linemen, so you kinda work for like the utility where for the most part you're just maintaining the grid.
Dan:Mhmm.
Elden:And then you have outside construction linemen, contractors as we call them, like me, where we maintain the grid, but we also build it for the future.
Dan:And the US needs to do a lot of building. Many old lines are in need of an upgrade, and the need for more power keeps rising.
Elden:Especially with the demand of data centers nowadays. The demand of power in the United States has expanded exponentially.
Dan:Because of AI?
Elden:Because of AI, because of electric vehicles, because of the growing population.
Dan:So futuristic technologies are driving demand for more power, but Elden spends a surprising amount of time dealing with one particular problem that's far more prosaic. Prosaic and cute and furry.
Elden:Squirrels make us a lot of money and the reason being, they they're touching the pole and the live conductor or sometimes you'll see a lot of times, they'll be on the transformer. And they'll be chasing each other around, chasing each other's tails and all that. And they'll be on the transformer, and the top side of the transformer has high voltage, 7,200 volts, 7,600 volts, or 19,000 volts. And we use some little protectors to protect them, we call them squirrell guards. The actual name is more technical than that, but everywhere you go in the country, they're gonna call them squirrell guards. And so I've responded to hundreds and hundreds of transformers peoples without light because a squirrel was there.
Dan:No way.
Elden:Yeah.
Dan:I had no idea.
Elden:So they're kinda moneymakers.
Dan:So the squirrels are not superheroes, they do get zapped frequently.
Elden:Oh, all the time.
Dan:Wow.
Elden:I've responded to some crazy stuff, possums on transformers and all kinds of stuff.
Dan:I mean, I wonder what the costs of squirrels to the economy are. I mean, given that you personally have dealt with hundreds, it must be billions of dollars nationwide.
Elden:Nationwide? I I wouldn't doubt it, billions of dollars for a little tiny squirrel.
Dan:That is so funny.
Elden:Yeah. So like in the trades and stuff like that, there's a big thing about stickers. People people in those trades love stickers on their hard hats and stuff like that.
Dan:Mhmm.
Elden:It's a common sticker for linemen that has a scroll that's like upside down and dead and like cash signs on top of it.
Dan:Oh, man. I love that. So so just to run with the squirrel thing for for one more question. When a squirrel is is sort of on its own on the wire, like not grounding itself, they're okay. And and by implication, does that mean if somehow we could put you up where you're holding on to a cable with both hands like in pull up position, like you would be okay?
Elden:Yes. So, we have what's called helicopter linemen as well.
Dan:Helicopter linemen?
Elden:Yes, sir. So these guys are essentially birds in the air. They land on the wire, whatever has to be done kind of stuff that has to be done on the wire, repairs, sometimes they're building or replacing stuff.
Dan:Wait. But are the are the helicopters like hovering and holding them in place?
Elden:Yes. Yes.
Dan:Woah.
Elden:Yeah. It's a big thing in the West where access is very limited to the towers and stuff like that, to the power line poles.
Dan:Yeah.
Elden:And so a lot of times, in the mountainous areas is a lot of helicopter work. And so these guys, these linemen are hanging either from a forty, fifty foot bungee cord and being flown like forty, fifty miles per hour over over mountains.
Dan:That is madness.
Elden:Yeah.
Dan:Elden told me the helicopter linemen are wearing what's called a Faraday suit, which allows them to touch 500,000 volt transmission wires.
Elden:It's like a metal mesh suit. Think of it like a chain mail with really, really fine chain links.
Dan:Uh-huh.
Elden:And basically, you become one with the wire, and the and the voltage goes around your body. And so you're basically touching it. It's imagine you ever seen like a somebody that's gonna analyze a crime scene and they wear that chemical suit or whatever? It's kinda like that, but it's actually made out of metal.
Dan:Okay. Back to the helicopter.
Elden:You're hanging off the side of the the helicopter, you're sitting on the little steps that the helicopter lands on, you're sitting on that. And as a bird on the wire, you land yourself, you touch the conductor, you become one with the conductor with your Faraday suit, and you're able to do it. The helicopter pilots, they're amazing as well, to be able to be as steady as they are, to allow the lineman to accomplish what he needs to accomplish.
Dan:Now, would you ever wanna get into that kind of helicopter centric work?
Elden:Yes. I I at least want the Instagram picture, you know?
Dan:Yeah. The the shot of you in the Faraday suit hanging from a... that would be pretty epic.
Elden:Yeah. And it's also the training behind it, a lineman, a good lineman at least, I'm not saying I'm good or anything like that, but a good lineman wants to be challenged. I think every person is looking for a challenge, you know, in a sense. And I wanna and I say that's top of the line becoming a helicopter, barehand certified lineman.
Dan:Mhmm.
Elden:And I just see it as a challenge.
Dan:And speaking of challenges, a perennial one faced by lineman is responding to storms.
Elden:You make a lot of money chasing storms, so you have some guys that that's all they do, is just chase storms all year long and
Dan:Oh, really? They just go from place to place?
Elden:Yeah. If it's a good year, it's it's... I hate saying this, but like every lineman when they look at the weather channel like, oh, it's gonna be a big winter storm or it's gonna be a big hurricane, they see the money signs.
Dan:Is that part of the work you do or no?
Elden:Yes, sir. I definitely have responded to many hurricanes, storm work, tornadoes.
Dan:After the break, Elden tells us about a 30-hour shift he worked after a devastating tornado blew through an area just outside of Houston. Hey, folks. Dan here with another casting call. We're thinking about doing a series later this year around airports and air travel. We've actually got a couple of great people lined up already. I'll keep you in suspense about that, But we are still lacking some crucial roles, flight attendants, commercial airline pilots, baggage handlers, air traffic controllers, TSA agents. Now, I have to confess, we've been chasing some of these jobs for a long time, so we really need your help here. If you know someone in one of these roles who would be good for the show, drop everything and email us now jobs@whatitslike.com. Thanks so much and back to the show. So about that tornado and Elden's marathon shift that followed, it started innocently enough.
Elden:My foreman gets a call and he's like, hey, we have to respond to this trouble ticket. I go, okay. He goes, we have to go to Cypress, which is like an hour and a half, two hours away. He goes, a tornado hit over there. And it's like Armageddon over there, Dan. There's trees toppled over everywhere. There's lines mangled into trees. You can't find the pole because there's so many trees down.
Dan:The crew that Elden is working with needs to replace three utility poles.
Elden:You get there, the pole is snapped in half from the twister. And so you have this, we call them digger derrick or a line truck. Like, it has a crane on it.
Dan:Okay.
Elden:It has a winch on it with the crane and with that, we're able to pull the poles out with the truck. It has like an auger that digs in the ground. So with that auger, digs a a new hole and with the same crane, we're able to grab that new pole that we framed out on the ground with all the equipment on it and set on in the hole, the new hole. We use dirt to tap it back and then run a new wire and repeat.
Dan:That's a great I can totally picture that. I had no idea that all of that stuff would be your turf, you know. The pole, the digging, the installation much less, you know, all the the wires that we would have expected.
Elden:Yeah. And and that, you know, that was just the first job. This whole neighborhood, probably about five, six thousand people didn't have lights on. And so we are going through every single backyard and there's wire down everywhere. Thankfully, we didn't have to replace poles because it was just wire, but I'm climbing five, six poles that night.
Dan:And he's climbing the poles with hooks, metal spikes that strap onto alignment's boots and legs.
Elden:And so you stab the spikes in the wood and that's how you climb.
Dan:In the past, linemen would free climb, just going up the pole with their hooks and no safety harness.
Elden:A lot of times when people think about somebody climbing a pole, that's what they think of because that's how it was done for generations, for a hundred years. So you would just use your hands on the back of the wood and you kinda climb like a monkey. You kinda just stab stab with your right foot, stab with your left foot, and you move your hands up as you go.
Dan:That was dangerous, of course. And now, linemen wear a safety harness that catches them if they start to fall. The harness is just one part of a lineman's gear. He's also got channel locks, a knife, lineman's pliers, and a screwdriver.
Elden:So I'm carrying these heavy tools from yard to yard to yard because every single wire is down. I had to climb up the pole. I have a rope and I throw it down. They send me up the new wire. Sometimes we can just splice it and just make them back up, so I was doing that. But it was imagine wire on top of people's garages, wires on top of people's houses.
Dan:Elden said that what makes these long hazardous shifts worth it is that moment when you get to see the ultimate effects of your work.
Elden:Whenever you see the lights, just as soon as you close in that, you know, that fuse and you see the people's lights just turn on or you hear the AC turn on, it makes it so worth it. That's the cool thing about our trade. It's kind of an instant gratification kind of thing.
Dan:Some linemen begin as groundmen. So those are workers who are not climbing poles yet. Then, you might become an apprentice lineman. There are seven steps to an apprenticeship.
Elden:You're a first step apprentice and every six months, you progress in to the next step. So you go first step, second step, third step. Now when you become fourth step, you become what's called a hot apprentice. Okay. You're able to work on on live wire.
Dan:Okay.
Elden:The reason behind that is you don't wanna put somebody that's never done this kind of work in the air dealing with 7,000 volts in their hands, right?
Dan:Right. I wanna I wanna come back to the the safety side of things for a minute. I'm curious, have you ever been hurt on the job?
Elden:Not to the point where it's like, well, I had to report an injury or anything like that. But I've been in some sticky scenarios. Let me tell you about one that I was in.
Dan:Yeah.
Elden:Put yourself in my shoes, close your eyes and just put yourself on a pole, a wood pole about 30 foot in the air in a backyard. Thankfully, were able to get a bucket truck to it.
Dan:You've probably seen these bucket trucks before. People can stand in the bucket and there's an arm on the back of the truck that raises it up so they can get to the wires. So two of Elden's colleagues are in a bucket. He's climbing on the pole messing with what are called secondaries, the wires that go from the utility pole to your house. And all of a sudden,
Elden:The pole shifts and I hear my friend screaming. Now he hears, ah. Now I look up, this transformer is squishing my good friend Chris on the chest while he's in the bucket.
Dan:Wait, just like it fell onto him?
Elden:Yes. The pole ended up being rotten.
Dan:Oh.
Elden:And it broke at the bottom. And so my buddy's getting squished.
Dan:Can you picture this? The whole pole is basically falling down. But by sheer luck, it bangs into the bucket and the bucket stops it from falling, which keeps Elden from slamming into the ground. That's the good news. But the bad news is that the transformer hanging from the rotten pole has jammed into Elden's friend in the bucket.
Elden:Thankfully, my foreman was quick. Hey. Hey. Go go go get these ropes. Go get these hoist. We're gonna pull this pole back. We're gonna move. We're gonna do this. He was great under pressure. We were able to tie some rope to a tree, pull it back, free up Chris. I'm in the air. We're able to use the what we call a backyard machine. These little tiny tiny mini excavators with a crane on it to tie it off and to hold the pole that's I'm on that's broken. And they were able to go down in the air. I was able to to hold the pole in a way where tie it with some ropes where it's not gonna go anywhere. We still had to finish the job, but my buddy Chris and Larry had to go to the hospital. Yeah. But Dan, if that bucket wasn't there, I don't think I'd be talking to you right now. I would have fell all the way to the ground through our garage.
Dan:Oh, man.
Elden:There's been other scenarios as well where when I was an apprentice and we were working a live... actually, it was my first day ever working live wire. I just became a four step, right? And I'm like, we we had to replace a broken cross arm. And I told my journeyman, like, hey, this goes back to being vocal about everything because you want to be... nothing nothing sounds too stupid in our line of trade. Anybody tells you otherwise, then they're too prideful for this job because I told my former my journeyman, I said, hey, shouldn't we put some cover? And by cover, I mean, like, these like these rubber blankets that protect if a face were to come on it or conductor were to touch it or a cable were to touch it, it's gonna be safe, it's gonna protect it.
Dan:Yeah.
Elden:It's it's not gonna act like a squirrel. Right?
Dan:Right.
Elden:And so I asked him, hey, don't you think we should put a blanket on the street light just in case? He goes, oh, no. It's good. It's good, Rivas. Yeah. Just I got this. Don't worry about it. As soon as he moves it, the cross arm breaks, lands on the streetlight. And these this ain't no, like, you ever like seeing where somebody plugs in an outlet and it just sparks?
Dan:Mhmm.
Elden:Imagine that times a thousand.
Dan:Oh, man.
Elden:The so the the heat that is generated by a conductor hitting the ground or metal or a pole is hotter than the surface of the sun. I've seen glass being formed from the heat of a wire hitting the ground. The sand on the concrete would actually crystallize into glass because they got so hot. I've seen it where a truck hit the and actually a fire truck. They were cleaning out the fire truck and they I don't know why this dude put the ladder on the actual conductor, and he went to ground. The truck became the squirrel and it was just burning up. There's glass everywhere around the truck, but it got so hot that the lug nuts on the tires welded onto the rim itself.
Dan:Woah.
Elden:And so it's a there's definitely a lot of hazards involved, but like I said, we are trained to mitigate. It's not a dangerous job. It's hazardous.
Dan:So, Elden, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here we go. What is a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know and what does it mean?
Elden:We call this drill, this power tool, we call it the hard money gun.
Dan:The hard money gun?
Elden:Yeah.
Dan:What is that?
Elden:Just a huge, like, handheld. It's not your regular home improvement drill, it's a utility drill. And we use it for hard money times, you know, instead of using a crescent wrench or a channel locks like we used to for a long time ago, we use a hard money gun to remove material equipment off a pole. So let's they call it a hard money gun because in order to use that, you gotta like have to have done your time, you have to have pay your dues. A lot of times as you come up, they don't give you the power tools right away.
Dan:What is the most insulting thing you could say about a lineman's work?
Elden:I could have done it better.
Dan:That's funny. There was some of that vibe with the welder we talked to too, that sort of competition of who Who who does the better craftsmanship.
Elden:Yeah. There's a joke I always say, if there's the one lineman in the air and there's two linemen on the ground, there's only one thing that they can agree on and that's that they could have done a better job in the air.
Dan:What's a tool specific to your profession that you really like using other than the hard money gun, let's say?
Elden:Yeah. It's called rubber gloves. You got these really really thick rubber gloves that you put on and then that's what allows you to be isolated from the live wire. That's what allows you to touch live conductors. So if I have to work on that 7,000 volt line, I'm able to actually touch it with my rubber gloves.
Dan:What phrase or sentence strikes fear in the heart of a lineman?
Elden:When I was at the utility, we had radios in the cabs of the truck and every radio had a red button and there would be a noise that would go beep. So the only time you ever hit that red button was if something bad happened, if you needed life flight.
Dan:Oh.
Elden:Somebody got hit. When we when we say somebody got hit, somebody got hit with electricity. And so, you'll hear that sometimes, you'll hear the beep and every single lineman stood still just to hear what happened afterwards. And you would hope that somebody just hit it by accident. But sometimes you're like, I need a life flight at this GPS coordinates right now. You weren't allowed to share the name or anything like that. You just tell them this is Truck 101. I need a life flight at Boom Boom Boom. Please, bye.
Dan:Have you ever been there when that happened?
Elden:I haven't been thankfully where I needed life flight or even a serious injury, I thank God for that. I have seen people get hurt as far as like my buddy that got crushed by a transformer, he had to didn't get life flight for him, but we ended up getting a he had to get emergency out to the hospital. Thankfully, he's okay. He just got some bruised ribs and stuff like that, but we had to hit the red button for him because, you know, it could have been so much worse. They could have hit the red button for me.
Dan:What's a sound specific to your profession that you're likely to hear?
Elden:Imagine just [buzzzz]. That is I mean, I hear it every day then and it still gives me chills.
Dan:I wanted to ask you about that because you can't really hear it from the ground. I was curious whether if you got closer, it does make a noise.
Elden:The high voltage, the transmission towers does, especially if it's a foggy day, if it's misty and stuff like that, you'll hear it. You'll hear it, it's called tracking. It's that voltage, electrons, free electrons are looking for a path to ground. And so they're like, oh, let me find something. They're itching to find a ground, you know, and that's the it's it's like they're angry. Or sometimes when you cut a wire and you have to make it back up, you'll see what's like these blue lines. It's it's electricity trying to make back up when you connect a broken or cut conductor back together.
Dan:Working that close to danger or hazards as Elden says, it has a way of clarifying what matters.
Elden:So when I got hired a long time ago, there was this guy that got me when I first started this trade, the person that got me in the trade, his name is Craig Casper. He was a lineman for 43 years. Amazing, amazing guy. Did amazing things in this craft. But people don't necessarily when they talk about Craig, I would ask people, you know, that were still around. Hey. Do you remember Craig? Do you remember Craig? You know what they would tell me? They wouldn't tell me, oh, man. He was a great lineman. He was great. He goes, no. They would remember. He was a great man. He was a man of integrity. Craig always did the right thing. So there's two things, Dan. Your name would outlast your career and your integrity would outlast your career. Being an integris person in your craft and just like I leave a signature on my piece of equipment or pole that I worked on, I'm gonna leave a signature in the hearts of apprentices that I'm gonna be working with. It's up to us. We're the next generation. A hundred and fifty years ago, Dan, one out of two linemen were dying. Now it's about 14 in a 100,000 or so. It then evens out to about 14 a year or so. But it's up to my generation to say, okay, no, no, that's not that's way too high because it really is.
Dan:Elden Rivas is a journeyman lineman in Texas. One of the things I love most about making this podcast is spotting similarities across jobs that look nothing alike. In the last episode, we had a health inspector and both linemen and health inspectors do essential but mostly invisible work. We only think about them when there's a crisis. The power's down from a storm or there's a foodborne illness outbreak and suddenly they're in the spotlight. This conversation also reminded me of the harbor pilot. Remember that one? We learned that global commerce depends on individual human beings scaling rope ladders up the sides of cargo ships. And here in this episode, we learned that the future of AI and its massive need for electricity depends on individual human beings climbing poles with hooks to install and repair wires. What was new to me here was the way this professional identity spans generations. The union dating back a 135 years, finding that another lineman had made the same mistake 60 years earlier, and Elden leaving his smiley face mark for the next generation. That's a powerful lineage. Every time we flip a light switch, we're relying on a long relay of lineman's hands we'll never get to shake. Chasing outages back to some tiny failure in a vast grid, keeping hazards at bay with discipline and caution, climbing poles with ropes and hooks, and living for that moment after an exhausting shift when the lights come back on. Folks, that's what it's like to be lineman. A shout out to recent Spotify commenters, Kathleen, Lynda M, PatVeach99, Leokunvagyok, thanks to you all. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.
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