Colleen / Arrington
Nelson County, Virginia
By Marcie Gates
Central Virginia Electric Cooperative in Colleen, Virginia is kicked off the first day of spring with a bang. In the wee hours of Monday morning, a crew of nearly a dozen men in steel-toed boots gathered together for a safety meeting concerning the clearing of power lines in the area.
Above, Photographer / Writer Marcie Gates captures the pilot taking off from CVEC headquarters and hoisting the 30′ long saw into the air. Monday – March 20, 2017
“We usually do it once every couple of years,” tells Bruce Maurhoff, Senior VP at CVEC. “We focus on the parts of our system that are really hard to get equipment to, and where the cost of trimming is much more expensive doing it with mechanical equipment and personnel.”
“This is my first time working for CVEC,” says Smith. “The timeframe depends on the project. We could be here a week, a month, it depends on the scope of the project, the budget, the weather – there’s a lot of different factors in there.”
Jason Todd Purvis has been an employee at the Co-Op for thirteen years, “And this’ll be my third time doing this. In case something bad goes wrong – tree limb falls through the powerline, knocks the lines down – we’re there to put it back up.”
Video By Tommy Stafford – Above, back in October of 2014, the helicopter tree trimming operations out in the field in Roseland, Virginia.
“You gotta look at it like this,” tells Purvis, who’s personality could never truly be put into words. “We deal with high voltage all day, every day, makes a man nervous. You gotta come to work with nothing on your mind. I know I laugh and joke, but when it comes down to it, you gotta know what you’re doing. I just try to ease it up for the guys when they’re working – and it does, it works. We have good days, makes the day go by, everybody’s happy, everybody goes home safe.”
The folks at CVEC tell us the aerial trimming operations will be ongoing for the next three to four weeks.
