Ryan Ward spends many of his workdays dozens of feet above the ground, inside a bucket hoisted by the steel arm of a heavy truck.
On an early November morning, the Henderson, Kentucky, native and his CenterPoint Energy teammates worked along Pigeon Creek Greenway’s Industrial Corridor, replacing a worn wooden utility pole off West Louisiana Street. This is a common routine on clear-weather days when no power-outage crisis exists. Even then, there are always grid upgrade projects for Ward and his colleagues to tackle.
Before joining CenterPoint Energy — the Evansville area’s main electric and natural gas utility, with around 150,000 customers across Southwestern Indiana — as an apprentice lineman, Ward served in the Marine Corps as an infantryman, including a stint in Syria and a deployment to Japan and South Korea. Having shot 60- to 80-millimeter mortars, he knows what treacherous situations are like.
Doing electrical work at high elevations was just one more challenge to take on.
“It was something new and different at first, but then it becomes easier,” Ward says.
As Ward pondered a new career after exiting the Marines about five years ago, line work seemed a good fit. He says the teamwork aspect is like that of a military unit, and some of his friends in the military took the same path, with positive results, after being discharged.
“They said you make good money, and they love it,” Ward says. “There’s something new every day. You can work outside, use your brain. It’s physical. And I wanted to get into a trade.”
Ward completed several months of training through the North American Lineman Training Center and graduated as an apprentice lineman. After four years of on-the-job work with CenterPoint Energy, he’ll move up in rank to a journeyman lineman.
There are challenges in Ward’s day-to-day duties, which include hooking up power and addressing issues at residences and businesses throughout the region. Large-scale power outages, though, are a different beast. When those circumstances arise, no matter the hour or day, Ward knows he needs to be ready.
“When we get storms that blow through and we have thousands of customers out, it’s kind of like, drop everything,” Ward says. “You know that it’s time to work, and you’re going to be working for multiple days, 16-hour days. Sometimes you’ll be working throughout the night, sleeping during the day, and it’ll mess your schedule up.”
Southwestern Indiana saw two such situations in 2024.
An April 2 storm packing peak winds of 70-90 mph knocked out power for nearly 24,000 CenterPoint customers. Line crews replaced about 150 poles, patrolled miles of lines, replaced and strung hundreds of spans of wire, and fought through and removed downed trees and limbs. Power restoration was completed April 5 — just before an estimated 40,000 visitors arrived to get a glimpse of April 8’s total solar eclipse.
Then, on July 30, an EF-1 tornado with peak winds around 110 mph blasted eastern Vanderburgh County and western Warrick County, leaving behind substantial wreckage and about 33,000 total outages. Crews faced high heat and humidity during restoration efforts, which were completed by Aug. 1.
Local utility personnel also respond to natural disasters outside of Southwest Indiana. Having served in the Marines, Ward knows what deployments are like, and in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl in July, he spent two weeks working on power restoration efforts in Texas. CenterPoint is based in Houston, and more than 2 million of the utility’s customers lost power.
The pay is good for prolonged work away from home, Ward says, but it’s exhausting. He and his teammates toiled in triple-digit summer Texas heat, “and you don’t know where you’ll be sleeping. It may not be in a hotel. It might be in your truck or on a cot. There’s a lot of sacrifices for sure.”
Additionally, Ward and his teammates had to learn on the fly while working in storm-devastated Texas communities. “Their electrical system’s totally different than ours,” he says. “We had to adapt to doing it the way they do it and using the material that they use. Even the voltage is different. And they have different rules and everything you have to abide by.”
CenterPoint workers also assisted with restoration efforts in the Southeast following hurricanes Helene and Milton in September and October. Those crews assisted overwhelmed utility companies in the impacted areas.
The so-called mutual assistance system is a hallmark of the utility industry and an important resource when widespread outages occur, according to CenterPoint.
“We always answer the call when our peer companies in other parts of the country make these requests,” Darin Carroll, senior vice president of CenterPoint’s electric business, said in a statement.
Ward says linemen and linewomen from all power companies are a close-knit group, and all understand that post-storm restoration – when stress is high and dangers are all around – is part of the job.
“Every lineman loves helping out and getting the power back on,” he says. “I mean, it’s what we signed up for.”
