Duke Energy
- Born and raised in Mount Dora, Florida.
- Colton is married to McKenzie, and they have a five-month-old son, Hudson and Dalton is married to Aeryn.
- Enjoys working out together every month, playing golf, taking the boat out and going fishing and doing just about everything together.
- At Duke Energy, they are doing a lot of storm hardening like self-healing technology, upgrading poles and undergrounding.
Early Years
Our brother-in-law inspired us. We saw the lifestyle he had, and he really introduced us to the career. Actually, we saw him compete at a Lineman’s Rodeo way back when and that kind of did it for us.
Day in the Life
Both of us started at 18 years old and started working for different contractors. We both came in as apprentices and worked our way up to lineworkers. For our day-to-day work, we do maintenance and pole change outs. We also get called to do outages and storm response.
Challenges and Rewards
The challenges are you are on call 24/7 and sometimes weather can be a challenge. We live in Florida so the heat can be tough, but there’s a lot of opportunities to get overtime. It’s a rewarding career. People are fun to work with, and we are like family. We love getting the lights on for our customers.
Safety Lesson
During our monthly safety meetings, we talk about the importance of safety and work methods. We also go over events or near-misses as a team and talk about ways we mitigate hazards. During one of these meetings, we actually played a 911 call of one of our team members. Because of our culture of safety, our teams knew how to respond to our teammate who was having a heart attack. It was just amazing to see and hear our teams’ quick response and how what we practice on a day-to-day basis helps us in a real-life situation. Safety is number one at Duke Energy and hearing how our team responded and ended up saving a coworkers life just made it that much more impactful.
Memorable Storm
Responding to Hurricane Ian down in Lee County was a storm experience we will never forget. We were there together for 13 days, including on our birthday. Just seeing the devastation and being able to replace the poles on an entire island was one of the most rewarding deployments. Even though we don’t serve customers in Lee County, it felt good to assist our neighboring utilities.
Plans for the Future
We would absolutely do it again. We plan to try to move up in the company, become supervisors and help lead the next generation of lineworkers.
Editor’s Note: All profiled lineworkers will receive a tool package from Milwaukee Tool for their dedication to the line trade. If you would like to nominate a journeyman lineworker for the Lineworker Focus department, please email Field Editor Amy Fischbach at [email protected].
