STORM RESPONSE: HEAT STRESS, ACCLIMATION & ACCIDENT PREVENTION Storm work already stacks the deck against us. Long hours. Heavy gear. Restoration pressure. Traffic. Backfeed. Broken poles. Trees. Customers watching. Crews working away from home, sleeping different, eating different, and trying to produce in conditions their bodies may not be ready for. Now add heat. Heat stress isn’t just a medical issue. It’s an accident issue. When a worker overheats, judgment drops. Focus drops. Grip strength drops. Patience drops. Communication drops. Small mistakes get easier to make. Shortcuts start looking reasonable. A good hand can miss something obvious because his body is fighting to cool itself down. That’s how heat turns into more than cramps or exhaustion. That’s how heat becomes a missed ground, a bad step, a poor setup, a rushed lift, a traffic exposure, or a contact. THE FIRST FEW DAYS MATTER Do not assume a crew is ready for the heat just because they’re experienced. A lineman can be experienced and still not be acclimated to the current conditions. Coming from a cooler region, coming off time away from hot work, changing shifts, working storm hours, wearing extra PPE, or jumping straight into heavy restoration work can all raise the risk. Acclimation takes time. The body has to adjust. During the first several days, especially for crews coming into a hotter or more humid storm area, supervision needs to be tighter. Work pace needs to be watched. Breaks need to be intentional. Hydration needs to start before the crew feels thirsty. Nobody proves anything by cooking themselves on day one. WARNING SIGNS TO WATCH FOR Watch yourself and watch your crew. Heat stress can show up as heavy sweating, headache, dizziness, weakness, nausea, muscle cramps, confusion, irritability, poor coordination, or a worker suddenly getting quiet and withdrawn. That last one matters. A hand who stops talking, stops joking, stops communicating, or starts making unusual mistakes may not be “just tired.”

CHEAP BIDS… HOT WORK… DEADLY MATH Lineman Bull$hit™ Academy Let’s start this new series exactly where it belongs… At the scene of the lie. Not the lie told after the incident. Not the lie buried in the report. Not the lie polished up in a boardroom and passed around like corporate wisdom. I mean the real lie… The one thing this industry has been dragging behind it for years, while pretending not to hear the chain rattling. Here it is… A whole lot of energized work is not being done because it is necessary. It is being done because the math got bad long before the crew ever showed up. That’s it. That’s the disease. And if this industry had any real stomach left for truth… we’d admit right now that one of the biggest root causes behind unnecessary exposure is the unholy marriage between unit pricing and lowest-bid cowardice. The Lie Starts on Paper Before the truck ever rolls… Before the briefing… Before the rubber gets checked… Before a man ever puts his hooks, sleeves, or gloves on… The lie has already started. It starts in the bid sheets. Unit sheets. Cost models. Procurement packages. All those neat little boxes where linework gets broken down into tidy categories for people who never have to actually do it. Pole change-out… Crossarm… Insulator… Transformer… Cutout… Dead-end… Reconductor… X units… Y dollars… next item. Looks clean. Looks efficient. Looks manageable. Looks like the kind of thing a power company can hand off to a contractor and say… “Give me your best number.” That’s where the bullshit walks in. Because linework is not clean. It is not predictable. And it damn sure is not uniform. One pole is roadside on firm ground with room to breathe. The next one is jammed in a backyard, boxed in with fences, telecom, trees, mud, bad access, traffic, and pissed-off homeowners. One piece of work is straightforward. The next one is one bad decision away from lighting a man up. But the paper treats them the same. That’s the first betrayal.