By: Camden Brandel, BREC Communications Summer Intern

When you think of an Engineer, it’s common to picture a guy with a hard hat on, holding a comically oversized blue sheet of paper, pointing at all the various details on it. At BREC, the Engineers certainly handle mapping but do so much more.

For my summer internship at BREC, I was given the opportunity to follow an Engineer around for a day and learn just what it’s like to be in their shoes. I arrived and met the Engineers all at their desks, and I glanced around at each of them, wondering who I would be spending the day with. Dereck Buford, BREC’s Manger of Engineering, entered the room and informed me that today I would be paired with Steve Dulaney, who had been with the Cooperative for 12 years. After giving me the proper safety equipment, Buford and the other Engineers began to depart. Steve explained to me that in the mornings, he and all the other Engineers discuss their workload for the week and develop scheduling for each day. Steve makes his plans for the day by organizing his jobs by location and determining the resources needed at each job site. He also makes note of the property owners involved to determine the total number of easements needed for the construction of the new powerlines. Before leaving the office, each Engineer creates their work schedule and shares it with other departments. This is done so that if an outage is reported and Steve is the nearest worker to the outage, management can send him to the pole, ensuring the quickest possible outage fix for BREC’s members.

As we drove to our first job site, Steve and I discussed the recent flood damage in neighboring towns like Lesterville, and all that BREC did to assist in the restoration efforts. He told me stories about how some of the linemen he knew had to swim across a swift flooded channel just to reattach some wire and restore power to an area. Steve also explained to me that Highway 67 serves as the dividing line for the engineers, and that he covered the eastern side. We arrived at our jobsite in Piedmont, where Steve GPSed newly installed poles. These GPS points are uploaded to BREC’s mapping system to ensure accurate record keeping of all new power lines in Black River’s mapping system. We then drove onto our second job, where Steve inspected a possible damaged pole. He made sure to note that a fuse needed to be replaced on the pole he checked to allow the feeder to remain on in the case of a fault occurring downstream from the fuse.

For our next job, we drove out and met a new homeowner member of BREC, who was having a transformer installed to serve his property. Despite the two only meeting a handful of times, Steve and the members were very friendly with each other, discussing how their lives, jobs, and families were. Steve then painted the ground to indicate the location of the new underground wire and pad mount transformer. After we left, it was time to break for lunch, where we went and got the weekly special from Harps and stopped by the Marble Hill Office to eat. There I was reunited with some familiar faces I had met at BREC’s Annual Meeting earlier in the year, as Steve and I ate lunch with a couple of employees from Marble Hill. Steve and the other employees chatted, checked in on the other families, and swapped stories from the previous weeks. Seeing Steve interact with both the members from earlier in the day, as well as his fellow BREC employees made me realize just how much of a family this industry is. Everyone knows each other and quickly becomes close friends who genuinely care for one another. Whether it’s a fellow employee or a member, they’re treated all the same.

After we finished our lunch, we checked a few more poles in an area damaged by recent flooding and sent in a report that some downed trees were on some of the line. In-between checking poles, Steve received a phone call from a member checking in on if he was installing his new generator correctly and safely. After the phone call, Steve told me that he likes when members call ahead before they install their equipment, so that when the Engineers and Lineman arrive, they don’t arrive to find that the member installed it incorrectly. Before we went back to the office, Steve agreed to do a quick interview with me. When asked what a typical day looks like for him, Steve answered with a laugh, “Every day is different, that’s what’s nice about this job, today we may be riding around and staking little jobs like we are, and tomorrow we might be building and staking a mile and half line back through the woods to a new location, so every day is different in this job.” When asked what specific storm or restoration effort stood out as the most memorable or difficult of his career, Steve had a likely common answer from BREC employees. “Probably, the 2021 tornado that took our office out. That was probably the most difficult, not for the amount of work that we had on that storm, but it was trying because we lost all of our equipment and our warehouse, and it was neat to see how the cooperatives across the state came together as a family, they brought us equipment, materials, trucks, everything. It was there a day or two after the storm, ready to go. We couldn’t have made it through that storm without all the other cooperatives in the state.”

When asked what kind of person thrives in the career of an engineer, Steve had a simple but effective answer. “In this career, you must be very self-motivated and have good leadership skills, as you’re by yourself all day. Good communication skills are needed as well, since we are working with members and the public a lot in this job.  We always have to remember that and have the ability to communicate with them, because they aren’t always going to understand the reasoning of why we have something going on, so you have to communicate that.”

Finally, I asked Steve what his life looks like outside of work, and what he enjoys doing in his free time. “My free time is spent with family and then I’m a big golfer, so anytime I can spend time with my family or go golfing I enjoy that, but with this job here, the phone rings a lot, so you have to be prepared to miss things too. It’s a job where you give up a lot of things at times, but it's part of it because we have to keep the lights on for the members.”

That last quote specifically is really what I grew to admire about these Engineers and Linemen after my days with them. These men have hobbies, interests, and families of their own, but for the benefit of the members, they must set those things aside at a moment's notice to help those in need. These men, like Steve, treat members like they treat their coworkers, like family. That’s the cooperative way.