Wiregrass Electric Cooperative lends hand to Gustav victims

Hurricane Gustav may have avoided the Wiregrass, but some Wiregrass residents didn’t avoid it.

Ten workers from Wiregrass Electric Cooperative traveled to Mississippi and Louisiana last week to help restore power to residences and businesses affected by Gustav.

“We went to help restore power to two different co-ops,” said Chris Jones, who supervised a crew comprising five workers from Ashford and five workers from Hartford. “We started at Coastal Electric in Kiln, Mississippi, and worked there two days, then went on to Demco Electric, which is in Zachary, Louisiana. They requested help (from) our area office in Montgomery, and they sent crews out from across Alabama.”

Jones and the other workers left on Labor Day and returned yesterday, and the memories of the destruction live on for Jones.

“It was damaged pretty bad,” he said. “There were a lot of trees down. Mississippi was mostly water damage. They had some tree limbs that fell, but mostly water. Louisiana had a lot of tree damage. A lot of big trees, old trees, a lot of them fell over. We saw a lot of poles broken and lines down. There was quite a bit of structural damage to houses. You could see tarps on houses where trees had fallen through roofs.”

Nathan Worsham, a construction foreman out of the Ashford office, remembers the damage vividly.

“It was really unexplainable,” Worsham said. “Everywhere you looked, lines and poles were down. Trees were down everywhere. There was flooding, standing water. We were working in Mississippi, where there had been an eight-foot surge in there off the bay.”

The mission was a dangerous one for the workers. The rain, especially, caused forced the workers to get creative when it came to doing their jobs.

“It was real wet. It’s wetlands, so it’s wetter than we are here. It’s a lot of swampy conditions,” Jones said. “All that rain that fell just made it that much worse maneuvering trucks around,” Jones said. “We had some trucks that got bogged down and stuck. We actually had a bulldozer pull our bucket truck in some places to work some poles.”

The trees and water increased the hazards for the workers.

“Trees were the biggest problem,” Worsham said. “The surge went down after a day and a half, but it made it real difficult to get to the poles because of the water standing.”

Despite that, the workers say the mission was a successful one.

“There was about 0 percent (with power) when we got there, and we got them to around 85 percent before we got out,” Worsham said.