Barry and Renee McCool, who have been married for 32 years, were celebrating number 12 just before Hurricane Katrina hit Simpson County. They have an interesting tale as they were both employed with Southern Pine – he as a lineman, she as a dispatcher.
Barry has been with Southern Pine 40 years, having joined as a right-of-way ground man. He left that crew in 1987 and went to a linemen crew driving a bucket truck. His next step was apprentice lineman.
Renee began her Southern Pine career in 1991 training at the Taylorsville office and moving to New Hebron in February 1993 as a dispatcher. The two met and a few short months later they were married.
Both headed out from their home to the office Monday morning, August 29, 2005 as on any other day. Barry said, “I don’t think we really realized how bad it was going to be until that Monday morning. I’m sure the company was prepared for it, but a lot of the guys and girls had no idea it was going to be that bad.”
Renee said, “That morning we were expecting some bad weather. I got there and it had started getting windy and was raining by 7 a.m. We had an outage right off the bat; one outage not far out of New Hebron. I called the serviceman, Bill Everett was his name. He drove over there and he got it back on. He came back to the office, it’s raining; the same one went out again.”
Everett made the call not to return, that there was no point to it. At least 60,000 members lost power during Katrina.
Barry was also out in the field that morning as the service man for Copiah County. “I remember that morning I had an outage right before it got real bad. They sent me over there. A tree fell on the line; I got part of it back on and half the lights back on. I was headed back to the office and it went out, what I just got on. By that time the wind had really started picking up. It was about nine miles from here. Trees fell in the road in front of me. I stopped to cut them out of the road and when I got out of the truck they started falling behind me. There I was, trees falling everywhere; that’s when it really got bad then. I was just lucky none fell on me.” Barry believes he was the only one in the field at that time.
He spent the rest of the day cutting his way back to the office,which is typically a 15 minute drive.
Renee shared her own memory of driving in those hazardous conditions. “We had to go home for some reason and I was following him. And the trees were like going over his truck and I was praying, ‘Lord please don’t let me watch a tree fall on him!’”
The,y like everyone else, lost power. While they spent two nights at home the couple moved into Renee’s office in New Hebron and set up camp until power was restored on September 16, sleeping on an air mattress that rarely held air, she said. Renee had a Styrofoam cup she used to keep tally of the days, making a slash for each spent at the Southern Pine office.
All the staff was housed there too as the office had backup generators. Renee recalls that while they could cook, they had no food. She called some church members and food donations began pouring in.
The linemen worked at least 16 hour shifts and sometimes longer, getting only five to six hours of sleep. They would be back up at daybreak to begin all over again.
Barry explained, “It was three or four days after it hit before we ever got anybody’s lights on. It took that long. The first circuit we got on was at Hazlehurst, got a three phase circuit on, which didn’t run very far. You couldn’t go far getting lights on because everything was down. The main feeders were down and the small feeders coming off of them were down. We weren’t making much progress. Everything had to be picked up, poles changed out, repaired before we could get the lights on.” There were thousands of poles down in need of repair or replacement.
Power restoration would have taken months, according to Barry, except for the additional co-operatives sending crews to Mississippi. “It took a while for them to get here. I think probably the second week of it we started to get some people in. It would have been months if we hadn’t had the help. But that’s the way it is in the electrical industry; people come to help.”
Once felled, trees were removed, and the crews got to work sites. The linemen still had to cut trees off lines, a slow process.
Renee added, “Whenever those trucks started coming in, it was like you just wanted to run out and hug them! You just don’t realize. We’ve always helped other people up until that point. You just don’t realize, and all the way from Georgia.” Barry added that he worked with a good crew from North Carolina that remained until most of the restoration work was complete, almost three weeks.
Southern Pine has come a long way since 20 years ago too, said Renee. At that time all outages were printed on paper classified by substation and line section. “Everybody and their brother is out of power. Our whole grid was completely down. It tore down the main lines coming out of substations because of the trees falling,” Renee explained.
Each call meant more paper. She would pull papers, dispatch, pull papers, dispatch, to the point that every surface was covered with paper including extra tables to accommodate the overflow.
The company has streamlined outage reporting since the storm. “Since then they’ve revamped the whole way we do outages. Now it’s on a map. Of course, I was old school and was like ‘what am I going to do without all my paper?’ First morning we went live, we had a major thunderstorm come through and I was the first one to do our outage. It worked like a dream. It was so much easier. And it’s much more accurate. Our map shows every fuse, every recloser, every line so you know exactly where the problem is.” Each truck is equipped with a monitor as well depicting the same map.
The couple agreed they saw the best and worst in people during those days. Some members did not hold back their frustration and Barry would be on the receiving end of those comments in the field. Renee helped answer phones and she too would receive less than desirable remarks. “Finally one night – Charlie Robinson was our manager. He told us to take those phones off the hook.”
Working together was all the couple had ever known, but this was different from most storms. Typically an outage can be repaired within a day, two at the most, after a storm knocks out power. Renee recalls it being nerve wracking but kept her emotions in check. “And usually when we’re at work, it’s work.”
She’s so used to the work she tries not to think about Barry not returning. “He’s prayed for daily. I guess because this is all we have known in our marriage – now I get really worried when he’s working 16, 18, 24 hours a day with electricity. They’ve gotten better about knocking people off after about 16 hours or so. People don’t understand they (the linemen) want to get their (customers’) lights on just as badly as they want them on. If they see there’s a chance they can get the lights back on they will work like dogs for 24 and I’ve seen them work 48 hours. And then leave our district and go help another district of ours.”
“It was definitely an experience. Through that kind of stuff you learn. I think we all learned a lot from Katrina,” Renee stated.
Barry wrapped up with appreciation. “I’m so thankful for the communities that helped, people using their own tractors and gas just to get the roads cleared. That’s what you got to have. When you get a disaster like that you got to have everybody for sure. And I hope that we never see another Katrina.”
