Wichita Linemen? : No, but Southland Crews Brave Height, Elements to Maintain Utility Towers

The tall metal towers look like giant legs striding across seemingly endless deserts, tramping up and over lofty mountains, marching through towns and cities.

And, if you look closely, sometimes you see in the distance tiny dots climbing or clinging to the glistening soaring steel, like spiders on enormous webs in the sky.

The animate specks are the linemen who erect, maintain and repair the 100- to 250-foot-high electrical transmission towers.

These high-wire acrobats of the utility world stroll nonchalantly across iron beams 100, 200, 250 feet in midair, hang sideways and upside down from their precarious perches securing huge bolts with giant wrenches.

By the time they’re in their early 40s, most of these men are ready to climb off the towers to find less strenuous work on the ground.

“It’s good money. Sure it’s always a risk. The idea is not to get careless, not to get electrocuted, not to fall,” explained veteran towerman Richard Dominguez, 40, who says he will keep doing this job as long as he can.

He had scrambled down in no time from the peak of the 150-foot tower under construction in the desert near Laughlin. It was lunchtime, and he was hungry.

It was high noon on a 100-degree-plus day. Dominguez gulped a cold soft drink, wiped the sweat from his leathery face and continued talking about the job he swears he would not trade for any other.

“It’s exciting to be in the air. You always have the feeling you are doing something not everyone can do. When the power goes out anywhere on the conductor lines on Southern California Edison Co. transmission towers, we’re the guys who get it back on as fast as we can.”

Edison has 24,000 huge transmission towers carrying 69,000 to 500,000-volt electrical conductor lines along a 12,000-mile path from Hoover Dam, from the Palo Verdes nuclear plant near Phoenix, from generating plants, from dams on both the eastern and western slopes of the High Sierra.

The towers carry power for 10 million people in 14 Central and Southern California counties, for homes and apartments, schools and stores, factories and hotels.

The 185 linemen who service these towers deal with it all--windstorms, snowstorms, salt storms, earthquakes, fires, floods, torrential rains, dense fog, subzero cold and 120- to 130-degree heat at all hours of the day and night. When there is an outage, they go. Another 64 brave souls do the same kind of work for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which provides electricity to 3.4 million customers.

Now and then a lineman is killed or seriously injured in a fall or is electrocuted. It doesn’t happen often, but the danger is always there.

Mike Bratten, 42, shot and wounded at Tay Nihn in Vietnam with the 9th Infantry Division, has been an Edison Co. towerman for 23 years. “I took three shots of 13,800 volts several years ago. It burned the wedding ring off my finger, but I survived and came back after a few days to recuperate,” Bratten recalled.

He told how his father advised him to apply for a job with a utility company “for security” after he got out of the Army. “I took the telephone, gas and Edison Co. test. Edison paid more. So I came here. I was asked if I was scared of heights. I said I didn’t think so,” Bratten said.

He worked on the towers until six years ago, when he became a tower construction foreman, and now works only on the ground. “That’s a long ways up when you’re in your 40s. By the time most men get to be Dominguez’s age they get jobs on the ground.

“Working in the air is a wonderful job for young men. It pays $19.68 an hour for a journeyman (after serving a three-year apprenticeship) with lots of overtime and out-of-town subsistence money. You get in your late 30s and early 40s and you wear out.

“It’s strenuous work. The older you get the tougher it gets. Leg and back operations are part of the job. I’ve had eight operations on my legs. The cartilage is gone on both legs. I loved every minute on the tower and miss it a lot.”

There’s plenty to be fearful about in this line of work--height, wind, electrocution.

“We’re up there in 20- and 30-mile winds all the time,” said Steve Berczik, 40. “Winds can blow towers over. Last year, a 100-mile wind leveled eight towers out by Blythe.”

Stan (A-to-Z) Alachniewicz, 34, who became a towerman five years ago after losing his job when the Kaiser steel plant in Fontana closed, had to conquer his qualms about working at great heights.

Overcame Fear

“I wasn’t real fond of heights,” he said. “Some guys sign on and have to quit because they can’t stand heights. But I had to get a job to support my family. When you need to do it, you got to overcome that fear, but it still bothers me and everybody else at times.”

Alex Garcia, 27, 3 1/2 years on the job, served four years in the Marines and knew he could hack it because he was lowered 200 feet on ropes from helicopters. “The first climb of the day you still get a little nervous. You try to be extremely careful at all times and watch what you’re doing. Edison drills the safety factor into our heads all the time.”

Paul Racine, 41, a foreman who worked in the air for 18 years, and was also wounded in the Vietnam War while in the Army, told how new men on the job spend six months to a year as groundmen sending material and tools to the linemen on towers.

“We are as safety conscious as you can be but sometimes there are accidents and we do get hurt, no doubt about it. But that’s understandable considering the heights the men work at and working around live wires with tremendous voltage. You hold on tight, strapped to steel with a web belt while working.”

Racine was on a tower when a fellow worker was electrocuted and helped lower the man’s body to the ground. Dwayne Ryssman, 29, who flies gliders in his spare time, said wives don’t want to know about the job or think about what their husbands do from day to day.

Erecting Tower

The 10-man crew erected the tower near Laughlin in three days to bring more power from the Edison generating plant here to a nearby Nevada Power Co. facility providing additional electricity for the fast-growing gambling resort community on the Colorado River.

Putting a tower together is much like constructing a giant piece from a Erector Set with ground crews and a huge crane hoisting steel beams to linemen on the tower who set them in place and bolt them together. “It takes more than a screwdriver and a pair of pliers to put it together,” laughed Alachniewicz.

If the towers are accessible, the linemen drive to the job, but more often the towers are in rugged inaccessible desert or mountainous terrain and the men have to be flown in by helicopter or walk from one to two miles to dense forested areas from lumber roads or fire breaks.

The linemen are often away from their families from a week to a month. And during natural disasters or power failures, working 40 to 60 hours nonstop without sleep is not that uncommon.

“There may be easier ways of making a living, but I wouldn’t trade this for love nor money,” insisted Berczik, his sentiments echoed by the other human spiders working in midair with web belts strapped tightly to the 150-foot tower nearing completion at Laughlin.