Journeymen… Foremen… General Foremen… Storm work is where truth shows up uninvited. Not in meetings. Not in policies. Not in after-action reports. In the dark. In the wind. In the fatigue. At the moment, someone trusts your call with their life. Storms do not care how experienced you are. They do not care how confident you sound. They do not care what you meant to do. They expose what you allowed... And right now … too many leaders are allowing gambling disguised as tradition. Journeymen … Your Hands Are the Last Gate The moment you topped out, excuses expired. You don’t get to assume. You don’t get to rely on memory. You don’t get to say “we already checked it” and move on. ET&D Best Practices exist because people died doing exactly that. You test. You verify. You confirm the absence of voltage using layers. A Personal Voltage Detector is one of those layers. If you’re not wearing one on storm work, that’s not confidence. That’s negligence wrapped in ego. And when something goes wrong … it won’t just be on you. Foremen … What You Tolerate Could Kill Someone Stop pretending this is about personal choice. Storms are not the place for optional discipline. If your crew isn’t running PVDs, that’s not a crew issue. That’s your standard … or lack of one. You don’t need another briefing. You don’t need another reminder. You need the backbone to enforce what already exists. Your people will follow what you enforce … not what you say. Every shortcut you ignore becomes permission. Every eye you turn away becomes policy. Storms don’t forgive soft leadership. General Foremen … You Own the Outcome This doesn’t stop below you. You decide what tools are normal. You decide what’s enforced and what’s optional. You decide whether layers are expected … or debated. If PVDs aren’t baked into your storm response, that is a leadership choice. And leadership choices have consequences. ET&D Best Practices talk about defense in depth because storms remove the margin completely.

Fatigue Is the Last Phase of the Storm… And It’s the One That Kills Without Making Noise Winter Storm Fern didn’t end. It just stopped being dramatic. The ice moved on. The wind shut up. The cameras packed their shit and left. (Unless you’re in Nashville) But the work didn’t. Tens of thousands are still in the dark across MS, TN, and LA. And the hands fixing it aren’t running on adrenaline anymore. They’re running on empty. This is the phase of the storm that doesn’t look dangerous. No chaos. No urgency on the surface. Just long hours, tired brains, and the quiet pressure to be done. This is where people get hurt. Fatigue doesn’t scream. It whispers. It narrows judgment. It shortens patience. It convinces good hands they’re still sharp when they’re not. It turns “I’ll slow it down” into “I’ve got it.” It turns job briefings into checkboxes. It turns cover-up discipline into muscle memory instead of intention. It turns silence into the path of least resistance. And nobody feels unsafe… Until somebody’s bleeding… Or not coming home. Storms don’t usually kill people at their peak. They kill people at the end… when pride, experience, and exhaustion collide. This isn’t about being tough. Tough doesn’t keep people alive. Stewardship does. Late-stage storm work is where Brotherhood stops being a word and starts being friction. It’s speaking up when everyone wants to finish. It’s slowing the tempo when leadership pressure isn’t loud… just implied. It’s watching the senior hands, not assuming they’re immune. It’s calling time when the only thing pushing you is fatigue and ego. Every Journeyman on this storm is teaching right now. You don’t get to opt out. You topped out… that made you an instructor. If you rush, you teach rushing. If you stay quiet, you teach silence. If you step in, you teach survival. Fatigue doesn’t excuse shortcuts. It exposes who’s willing to carry the weight anyway. A Moment for Those Already Paying the Price Before we talk about finishing…

This one is for my peers, my Brothers. For the Journeymen. This is also a warning shot across the bow for: The safety and training professionals who claim stewardship of the next generation. I’m passionate about teaching and training because I was in their boots. And because whether we like it or not… every Journeyman is already teaching. We don’t get to opt out of that responsibility. The moment you topped out… the moment you were trusted to work without supervision… You became an instructor. Not by title… but by example. Every decision you make in the field teaches something. Every shortcut teaches something. Every time you slow down… speak up… or stay silent… it teaches something. We teach behaviors… We teach patterns… We teach techniques… And we do it whether we intend to or not. That’s the weight of being a Journeyman. I remember being a young hand sitting in rooms where the person at the front couldn’t explain their way out of a paper bag. They had the title. They had the credentials. They had the authority. What they didn’t have was understanding… You’d ask a real question… not to challenge… but to survive. And instead of clarity, you got buzzwords. Instead of an explanation, you got irritation. Instead of teaching, you got shut down. That damage doesn’t stay in the classroom. It follows people into the field… It teaches young hands to stop asking questions. To hide uncertainty. To accept confusion as normal. That’s how dangerous habits get passed down quietly. And too many of us have watched it get worse. I’ve worked with instructors who had no passion. No drive. No ambition to sharpen themselves. They weren’t there to build people. They were there to coast. To cruise. To draw a paycheck. Training became a parking spot instead of a responsibility. I’ve known training “professionals” whose depth of understanding rivaled “Simple Jack”. If you’ve seen Tropic Thunder, you understand the reference. Blank stares. Broken explanations. Zero ability to connect cause and effect.

This was gonna be next week, but with the potential for winter storms later on this week, I'm posting it today. Storm Response … The Mythology We Hide Behind Storms have mythology. We tell the same stories every time … the hero crew, the iron stomachs, the men who don’t sleep, don’t complain, don’t stop. We turn exhaustion into honor and recklessness into resolve. We frame suffering as proof of commitment. That mythology doesn’t come from the field. It’s built above it. Storm culture loves the image of sacrifice … as long as someone else pays the cost. It glorifies endurance while quietly ignoring judgment. It praises toughness while punishing restraint. It rewards those who stay moving … not those who keep people alive. We call it grit. It’s not. It’s narrative control. The mythology says real linemen push through. Real leaders don’t slow things down. Real crews don’t need rest … they need heart. And anyone who questions the pace just doesn’t want it bad enough. So people learn the role. They hide fatigue. They bury doubt. They keep going long after their decision-making is compromised … because the story says stopping is failure. From the outside, it looks legendary. Social posts. Photos in the rain. Smiles through exhaustion. Leadership reposting bravery as if it were part of the plan. In the field, it’s something else entirely. Adrenaline covering cracks. Luck carrying weight it was never meant to hold. Close calls are reframed as proof that the system works. That mythology collapses the moment something goes wrong. Then we rewrite the story. We say it was unforeseeable. We say the storm was extreme. We say no one could have known. But the field always knows. The margin was gone. The people were spent. The pace was reckless. The mythology didn’t fail. It succeeded. It kept people quiet. It kept trucks rolling. It kept leadership insulated. Storm mythology doesn’t exist to honor workers. It exists to make their sacrifice feel inevitable.

Ya'll have seen the Safety Sundays, and I love the conversations they spark. Those will continue, but we can do better. Starting today, a new weekly post will be added to the mix. It will call out... What We Don't Say Out Loud. Let me know what you think... What We Don’t Say Out Loud … Week 1 Here’s something we don’t say out loud… This trade accepts casualties … it just doesn’t admit it. We don’t use those words. We soften it. We dress it up with words like "inherent risk" and "part of the job". We pretend every death is an anomaly instead of a receipt. We hold the funeral. We make the post. We say his name. Then we go right back to rewarding the same behaviors that put him there. Speed over judgment. Silence over friction. Completion over condition. We teach people how to endure pressure, not how to resist it. We train them to keep moving when their gut is screaming to slow down. We condition them to ignore fatigue, doubt, and fear … because those things interfere with production. And it works. Until it kills someone. From the outside, the job looks successful. The lights are on. The storm is cleared. The outage numbers drop. Leadership moves on to the next win. In the field, everyone knows how close it came to falling apart … how many corners were cut, how many chances were taken, how much luck was spent to make it look clean. That’s the blood on our hands we don’t measure. And when someone finally does die, we act surprised. We investigate the last decision instead of the years of pressure that shaped it. We blame the hand closest to the wire and protect everything upstream of it. That’s not tragedy. That’s design. And until the trade is willing to face that … not memorialize it, not spiritualize it, not sanitize it … it will keep feeding good people into a system that already knows the cost… …and has decided it’s acceptable. ~Kevin | Lineman Bull$hit™ Academy