Mother Nature often unleashes her fury through blistering snowstorms, devastating earthquakes and forceful hurricanes. These severe storms often snap utility poles in half, crash trees down onto power lines and knock out power to hundreds of thousands of customers. They also bring linemen out in droves to restore electricity in the most extreme working conditions, from subzero temperatures to pounding rain to sizzling heat.

Linemen often work 12- to 16-hour days during storms, spend weeks at a time away from their families and put their lives on the line to restore power. At the same time, however, they also earn overtime, get the opportunity to meet line crews from across the country and gain experiences of a lifetime.

Every lineman has a story to tell about his or her favorite storm. Long after power has been restored, these storms live on in the memories of linemen. Here are the stories of 10 storms that linemen remember to this day.

Fighting Ice

Five years ago, two inches of ice encapsulated utility poles in South Dakota during a severe Midwest ice storm. The local crews turned to NorthWestern Energy of Butte, Montana, to help restore the infrastructure.

Mike Glueckert, a journeyman lineman for NorthWestern Energy, served as a foreman for the storm restoration and worked 20-hour shifts for three weeks. He remembers working in 35°F-below-zero temperatures to replace the poles, which were lying on the ground.

Something else he will never forget is the generosity of the local community and the devastating effect of the storm on the local farmers.

“The poor farmers had a hard enough time making a living and to have something like that come through and be without power for two or three weeks was tough,” said Glueckert. “I saw dead animals, people struggling to stay warm, dairy operations that were dried up and homes that were frozen, flooded and ruined.”

One thing that struck him, however, was how nice the farmers and local residents were to the line crews. Many of them were struggling to heat their homes with small generators, and they had virtually nothing. As such, they were very appreciative when the linemen restored power.

“The people in Mitchell, South Dakota, put out a sign that said, ‘Thank you, linemen,’ and they gave us anything they had from their farms, like milk and cheese,” said Glueckert. “That makes our job so much more rewarding and inspires us to keep going.”

Quaky Ground in Los Angeles

Foreman Mike Dario will never forget the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake. Normally, the whole valley is pulsing with streetlights, but after the earthquake, millions of people were plunged into darkness.

“There were no lights, period,” said Dario of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), who worked 14 years as a troubleman before becoming a foreman. “It was an unbelievable sight. It was like being out in the middle of nowhere, which was kind of eerie. You know the population is there, but everything was dark.”

When Dario was called into work, he quickly assembled the crews and got them to work as fast as possible. His crew worked 16- to 18-hour days to restore power, which took its toll on him and the other linemen.

Fortunately, he said his wife is understanding when he has to leave home for storm-restoration work.

“I've worked in the troubleshooting section for so long that she knows what to expect,” said Dario. “It's similar to a firefighter's family. They understand what's going on, and they learn to cope with it.”

Even after five days of pouring in overtime, the linemen still had conductor lying on the ground, Dario recalled. The primary conductor that fed entire neighborhoods was damaged, and the LADWP lost its incoming transmission lines and major receiving station equipment.

When they finally restored the power, the customers were all very appreciative, he said.

“The biggest thing about being out there that is positive is seeing the customers' reaction,” he said. “They are so grateful for the service we provide and it makes you feel good.”

Freezing Rain

When Dave Simpson, a project supervisor for a line apprentice crew at Hydro One, first embarked on a trip to help with a 1998 ice storm in Ontario, Canada, he figured he would only be gone a day or two. Instead, it was three weeks until he returned home on Super Bowl Sunday.

Simpson, who has been working in northern Canada for the last 28 years, said he knows the area like the back of his hand. But in any storm-restoration effort, logistics play an important role as well.

“You need to get the right people and the right equipment to the right places,” said Simpson. “You get the information from the call center secondhand, so you have to read between the lines to know where to send your crews to put your resources to the best use.”

When the crews arrived on the scene, Simpson said the damage was surreal.

“The further east we went toward southeastern Ontario and the border, the worse it got,” he said. “I learned that Mother Nature was not a force to be reckoned with.”

While he expected to contend with cold, windy and snowy weather, he was surprised when freezing rain continued to fall. The weight of the ice yanked down hundreds of poles, towers and trees. The linemen spent weeks trying to prevent the rest of the lines from falling down.

With no grocery stores or gas stations for miles, the linemen had few resources. Fortunately, the community came together to help out the field crews. People invited the linemen into their homes and schools to warm up and enjoy hot meals.

“We never heard a bad comment from anyone at anytime about how long it was taking,” he said. “They knew we were out there doing everything that we could.”

At the time, he had young kids and his wife had a hard time with his absence, recalled Simpson. However, his wife understood that while she needed his help, there were others who lived 33 days without power in the wintertime.

Hurricanes Bob and Jeanne

Sometimes, a veteran lineman's favorite storm story dates back to the time when the lineman was an apprentice. For Kevin Kelley of Tacoma Power, that storm was the 1991 Hurricane Bob on Cape Cod.

Lines were spread out everywhere, poles were on the ground and the beaches were ruined. Kelley said he and his crews worked for 10 days to restore power following that storm, which killed 18 people and caused $2.8 billion of damage.

Convoys of bucket trucks drove to the location from New Jersey and Massachusetts, and once they reached New England, the linemen were dispatched to different locations. Kelley remembers hearing the cheers of the local residents when a convoy of trucks traveled through the town.

“You could tell people were happy to have us there,” Kelley said. “It was amazing, and I've never seen anything like that.”

For Brad Smith, a lone lead lineman splicer for Kansas City Power and Light, one of the most memorable storms was also a hurricane. After Hurricane Jeanne ripped through Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1994, his crew loaded up in a truck to drive down to the Gulf Coast. When they reached the town just east of Memphis, Tennessee, they told them to stop because there was no gas or any rooms farther south. Instead, the line crew was directed to Little Rock, which had been hit with heavy winds and rain.

Many trees and poles were broken, and getting the community up and running was very rewarding, said Smith.

“Linemen have a lot of pride when something is destroyed, and they have to figure out how to get it fix and get the lights turned on again,” he said. “You feel a true feeling of accomplishment when you go into a backyard and everything is broken to smithereens. You can then clean it up, get the new wire strong and hot, and get the power back up. After storms, people will have to deal with damage to their homes, but at least they will have lights.”

Midwest Twister

From hurricanes to tornadoes, Smith has worked more storms than he can count. He recounted his Hurricane Jeanne storm already, but another storm will always stick out in his mind because of its sheer destruction.

Two years ago, a tornado sliced through Joplin, Missouri, damaging hundreds of homes and killing 16 people. Smith remembers seeing a fallen TV tower, which missed a family's home by about 3 ft. Instead of landing on the house, the tower landed on top of the family's van and crumpled their baby's car seat like a tin can.

Almost every Kansas lineman will work a tornado at some point in his or her career, and James Huber is no exception. The lineman, who lives in the heart of Tornado Alley, has seen his share of terrible twisters. Huber lives in Pratt in south central Kansas and has traveled to many towns repairing tornado damage.

While all of the tornadoes have inflicted severe damage and destruction, one twister nearly wiped a town off the map. Back in May 2007, an F5 tornado tore through Greensburg, Kansas. The town is only 30 miles west of Pratt, so a few hours after the tornado hit the town, the Pratt crews loaded up and headed to the town with three bucket trucks, one digger and one skid loader. The linemen also brought along a 300-kVA three-phase generator to help restore service.

“When we arrived in Greensburg, the entire town was gone,” Huber said. “The only thing left was on the very east end of town where there were a few blocks of houses and a gas station that was half gone.”

Huber described the first night as something out of the movie “Twister.” The field crew cut down any lines that blocked the roads to allow vehicles to get through. As dawn appeared, Huber said it was a sight he will never forget.

The emergency officials shut down access to the city and asked everyone to leave town and didn't allow anyone to enter Greensburg with the exception of the search and rescue teams and the linemen.

After the linemen removed the lines, they started going up and down the streets setting transformers upright. The first morning of the restoration was dark and cloudy, and the air was filled with the scent of old, musty houses.

Huber recalls it being eerily quiet as he and four other crew members moved up a street still searching for transformers. Their mission changed quickly when one of the linemen heard a faint cry. At first, the lineman thought that it was a baby calf bawling because several cattle were roaming the streets. The crew soon discovered, however, that the sound was coming from the basement of an old church.

“When we found that there were people down there, that got my heart pumping,” said Huber.

His crew ran over and started removing debris from the staircase that led down to the church basement.

At that time, Huber was on his truck's radio trying to direct EMS to the church because there was no cell phone service available. When EMS asked him for his location, he was hard pressed to give them a clear answer.

“I was in an unfamiliar town that had no landmarks left and no signs, so I directed them to the northwest corner of town and told them to look for the truck with the bucket stuck up in the air,” he said.

Because there were no buildings or trees left to block the view of the bucket truck, the EMS was able to quickly find Huber's crew's location. The next problem was trying to get the ambulance to the old church.

“It was like a maze through the streets, but they finally got there 15 minutes later,” he said.

By this time, the line crew had already helped three elderly women and a man with one leg.

The crews then spent the next six weeks rebuilding line to temporary trailers and water and wastewater plants. The linemen also used the generator they brought from Pratt on the fuel pumps to restore power to the residents of Greensburg, who spent years trying to recreate their community following the devastation of the tornado's destruction.

Snowstorm at Tahoe

Heavy snowfall tore down transmission and distribution lines going into the lake in North Lake Tahoe back in 1982. Lineman Rick Smith of NV Energy, who recently retired, said it was his first major snowstorm, and he worked countless hours to restore power. Often, he and his crew would put the wire up and get it working, only to have it torn down again by a falling tree. Because he could not drive his bucket truck across the snowy terrain, he strapped on snow shoes and climbed poles.

“We worked as many hours as we could and tried to get some sleep,” he recalled. “We knew it was an ongoing job, so we had to pace ourselves because it was going to be the same thing day in and day out. We worked 20 hours a day for days on end.”

Smith spent two weeks on the job, and he said he dressed for the weather, which stayed relatively mild. Despite the strenuous work conditions, all the linemen pulled together to help one another, Smith said.

“Everyone out there is in the same boat,” he said. “You're cold and tired, but you get the work done so you can get back into the truck where it's warm. Because linemen are one big team, you also take care of each other on storm calls.”

Microbursts in Arizona

Edward Ford was on the way to a routine trouble call when ominous clouds moved in over town. In the blink of an eye, the rain poured out of the sky, and the winds whipped around at 100 mph. The microburst, which hit Yuma, Arizona, in 1989, was unlike anything Ford had ever seen or hopes to ever see again.

Within a two-week period, two major storms wreaked havoc on the city's poles and towers. The field crews spent weeks restoring power to customers after the first storm blew into town and then another microburst followed right on its heels.

“We had a string of 3 miles, where the wind snapped every one of the poles 10 ft or 12 ft above the ground,” recalled Ford, a troubleshooter for Arizona Public Service.

The storms knocked down 200 poles in the area, and the field crews worked 30 hours on and 30 hours off for weeks on end. To prevent the crews from falling asleep behind the wheel, Arizona Public Service appointed meter readers to handle the driving. Exhausted, Ford said he just tried to remain focused on the work at hand.

“Back in those days, you would work these long, extreme hours,” he said. “I'm glad those days are gone.”

Fire in Nevada

Last winter, a fire burned down power lines from Good Springs to Sandy Valley, Nevada. The entire cities were out of power, and NV Energy linemen were called on to rebuild a power line. Over the course of 48 days, the crew repaired countless miles of line.

NV Energy foreman Shannon Skinner remembers hand-digging holes for poles in mountains and setting poles with helicopters. She enjoyed training the young apprentices on working with the helicopters.

The job went smoothly, and she said there is no better feeling than when a crew works like a well-oiled machine.

“Getting everything back up makes your heart pump,” she said. “There's a feeling like you wouldn't believe to complete a hairy job safely and effectively.”

Because linemen have such a strong camaraderie, they are able to work well together, said Skinner. She has worked in a lot of different trades in her life, and she said there is no other trade like line work. In fact, during her storm-restoration efforts, she has met linemen from all over the country. Sometimes when she is on an airplane, a fellow lineman will holler her name from three rows back. Other times, she will get a call from a lineman, and even if they have not talked for years, it is just like they talked yesterday.

“We trust ourselves with our lives, and we're like a family,” Skinner said. “We know linemen all over the country, and we take care of each other.”

Highest Recorded Wind Speeds

A giant wind storm, with the highest recorded winds in Nevada, knocked out power for weeks in Reno. Called the “Big Blow” by the locals, the storm required four line crews from NV Energy as well as several contractors to come in to repair the damage. Foreman Doug Mann said the storm especially stands out in his mind because it is the only one he has ever worked with his father, who is a lineman for PAR Electric. The crews spent two weeks restoring power despite the frigid temperatures.

“You never have outages on a blue, sunny day,” Mann said. “Oftentimes, it's wet, cold, windy and dark, and many times, it's all of the above.”

On the Reno storm, the line crews had to contend with cold temperatures, heavy snowfall and high winds, which snapped the tops off of poles.

While that job was one of Mann's most challenging to date, he said the Reno residents appreciated the linemen's work, and he derived satisfaction from knowing he played a part in restoring the system and getting everything back up and working.

During storm-restoration efforts, linemen work never-ending hours, endure extreme weather conditions and battle adversity to get the power back on for their customers. Through teamwork, camaraderie and commitment, linemen can handle whatever Mother Nature throws at them. Whether their towns get hit with an ice storm, hurricane, tornado or earthquake, they grab their tools, jump in their trucks and get the job done. Then long after they resurrect fallen poles, string new wire and repair damage, the memory of that storm lives on.