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Discover Co-op Conversations with DEMCO as we explore the power of a local member-owned not-for-profit electric cooperative. Since 1938, DEMCO has woven cooperative principles into every wire, and our business isn’t just about electricity.
At DEMCO, we’re more than just an electric company, and our work, is more than just a job. As a local member-owned cooperative, we are your neighbors, your family and your friends. We exist to serve you, and we take a lot of pride in all that we do.
Our mission is to enhance the quality of life for our members, employees, and communities by safely providing reliable and competitively priced energy services. You’ve probably seen us out in the community—at events on and off duty—doing what we can to make a difference.
And now, you can hear us on your favorite podcast platform as we discuss what makes cooperatives special and inform the community about how we are striving to serve you in everything we do.
DEMCO, Powering life and community, that’s the cooperative difference!
David Latona:
Welcome to Co-op Conversations with DEMCO,
where we talk about the topics that impact your power,
your co-op, and your community. I'm your host,
David Latona.
Today we're talking with Cody Glascock,
one of our district managers who started his career with DEMCO
back in 2002 as a helper. He then worked his way up to a lineman
position,
then crew chief, and now leads crews across his entire district.
Welcome, Cody.
Cody Glascock:
Good to be here.
David Latona:
You've been at DEMCO for a long time.
That's according to my math, 24 years.
So you've seen a lot, Cody. You've seen a lot of responses to
major outages.
You've seen a lot of hurricanes and tornadoes and ice storms,
all that response to large outages.
But we want to get your take today on when the lights go out.
You know, most people think I know exactly what the crews are
doing because the lights are out.
But let's talk about what those crews do when there's not an
outage,
when there's regular maintenance that takes place.
Walk us through some of that day in the life of a lineman.
Cody Glascock:
So when there's no power outages and no restoration taking place,
we're typically trying to get ahead of it and do maintenance
programs,
connecting new consumers, building line to new facilities.
So there's a lot goes on outside of power restoration.
David Latona:
I know that a lot of the work you do is for the reliability side
of that,
and I know safety is important too. We'll get into some of that.
But tell us about what's the normal sunrise for a lineman when
they get to work on a normal day.
This is a nice spring day. No storms,
no nothing.
What are they looking at when they start the day?
Cody Glascock:
So a normal day for a construction lineman would start at seven,
and a normal day for a service man starts at eight
in the morning, of course. And at Central it's very densely
populated,
so there's a lot goes on after hours,
like at night.
So when the crew gets in in the morning,
we have the day planned,
but we have to make sure nothing happened the night before to
where as an employee might have timed out,
and we're filling a gap, or we had an outage the night before,
and we still have issues to address.
But other than that, a normal day,
a lineman is going to show up,
his crew chiefs going to have a five day work plan.
So they already know what they're going to build. And you have to
DOTD regulation.
You have to do a pre-trip inspection on the truck. We make water
every morning.
We preflight the buckets in the digger trucks.
So there's anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour of just
preparation safety wise and
getting ready for the day before we roll out.
David Latona:
Let's talk about that safety. I know you said the inspections and
things that go into the equipment that you guys use.
I know every employee at DEMCO should be safe in everything they
do,
but there's just another level of that safety when it comes to
the men who are working on those lines.
Cody Glascock:
It's a very famous saying amongst the line world,
"I am my brother's keeper," so we watch out for each other.
David Latona:
So how do you, as the leader of these men,
remind them how important safety is to getting them home
every night?
Cody Glascock:
I make sure to let them know at the end of the day,
I want them to go home the same way they came to work.
And we're never going to rush a job.
We're never going to cut corners.
You know, what it takes is what it takes to be safe.
So where the challenge of my job is,
is efficiency.
So you can be faster by being efficient,
but we're not going to be faster by rushing,
cutting corners or not following proper protocol.
David Latona:
Yeah. You want to take care of those guys.
You're their leader. So you want to show that to them as well.
So I don't want to get too deep.
But let's talk about the priorities.
When you're starting the day with several different work orders
that are coming through your district,
how do you prioritize when you're assigning that work out to your
men?
Cody Glascock:
So the crew leaders, they're very experienced men.
So they know priority levels. Where I step in is,
hey, we got a call.
Customer's calling in, especially outages or voltage complaints.
That takes precedence over anything else we're doing.
So if Crew A had a job to just change out a maintenance pole to
better the system,
but I have a circuit blinking or something of that nature,
we're going to pull resources and
divert our manpower to that.
David Latona:
Sure. That makes sense. There's something you recognize as an
experienced employee at DEMCO,
but also their leader that, you know,
hey, this needs attention more so than this does.
Cody Glascock:
It's crew size. It's distribution of your resources.
So if left unmanaged, I might have six guys show up because
they're all eager to help.
So when I have an outage, they're listening.
But I'm like, wait, we have other things going on.
So I have 23 men, so we distribute evenly throughout the
district.
David Latona:
Can you talk a little bit more about what are some of the things
crews are doing every day that help prevent outages before they
even happen?
Cody Glascock:
So as a manager, I'm assigned goals yearly to inspect,
like, say,
line patrol. I have 48 circuits in my district.
I have to assign men to do a visual inspection of all those
circuits.
We go out in the field, capture the data,
you know, the problems we see.
If it's a priority or an immediate issue,
could cause an immediate outage,
we fix it then. We document all the problems we find.
We store the information, and once all inspections are made,
we're turning around and fixing it.
So typically most of the year, we're visually inspecting and
looking and trying to find issues.
David Latona:
Your men are making inspections that are creating the service
orders that you're going to attend to based on their
knowledge of that system or that circuit.
Cody Glascock:
That's what we're trying to prevent. We're trying to keep the
lights on.
David Latona:
Yeah, yeah, that's a great point that their inspections and their
knowledge and their creation of those service orders are
preventing the member to have to do that themselves on an issue
that they face with their service.
So as a lineman, you've done this for a long time.
You started as a helper, then to a lineman,
now you're leading the team.
But I know still when that phone,
whether it's a text message or a call in the middle of the night,
it gives you a certain feeling. And I'm sure your guys have that
same feeling.
So tell me what's going through your head when you get that call
to report,
a matter you have to address in the middle of the night.
Cody Glascock:
When they're calling me, most of the time they're looking for a
little guidance.
It's 1:00 in the morning. They have to make a decision that's
kind of outside of their regular.
You know, the main thing when my phone rings is the first thought
that I have is I hope everybody's okay.
David Latona:
Yeah. That's important. I know that gives you a sinking feeling,
knowing of the dangers that they face during those
outage responses. Tell me what's going through their mind when
they're laying down asleep at night and that call comes
through. How does that technology work?
What are they feeling? Tell me about your experiences too when
you were a lineman getting those same calls.
Cody Glascock:
DEMCO has advanced a lot through the years:
technology, efficiency,
the way we do things. When I first started,
I was given a pager.
I don't think I had a cell phone when I started here.
So when they would call us out at night,
it was a human being in a control center,
and he would call you personally,
and you would have to write down,
or he'd wake you up, and you had a notepad,
and you would write down the address and the pole number of where
the outage was, and it was like that.
Over the years, now we have a call out system where it's a push
of a button,
and it's automated, and it tracks when the lineman was called.
They send him a text notification of the outage.
It has a hyperlink to, I believe,
Google Maps to where it takes him right to it.
So we're feeding the lineman more information to better help them
get in route to that outage to
assess the situation quicker.
David Latona:
Wow. And then what about that feeling of pride when they get that
call,
and they want to go and make that restoration.
I know they live for bringing people's lights back to service.
So tell me about that feeling they have when they get that call
at night.
Cody Glascock:
I'm still in awe of how these guys respond because you'll have
LSU baseball game.
It's a Saturday, and if it's an outage that requires extra help,
they're having to leave.
They're having to leave prior engagements.
And I've never had to call my men and like,
put a thumb on them.
They're coming. It's what they signed up for,
and they don't want to leave their fellow coworkers out there
shorthanded.
David Latona:
That's great to hear. And I know just in hearing DEMCO's mission
that reliability is such a big part of that.
We want to be safe, but we want to provide reliable service to
our members.
And that's not just something DEMCO employees came up with.
That's addressing the wants and desires of the membership.
So can you talk a little more about some of the things that
members might not see that we
do on a daily basis, that really makes a difference?
The things that you've experienced as a lineman,
even a leader in your role now that you see this goes on every
day and not everybody gets to see this,
but I know it's something for our members to be proud of.
Cody Glascock:
Yes, there's a lot goes on more than just setting a pole,
which you would typically think a lineman does.
He sets a pole. He climbs a pole.
There's a lot of thought and a lot of effort behind the scenes of
what can we do to make this better?
After the outage, if we have broke pole,
a lot of the customers don't realize like,
we have to take that broken, all that material back to the yard
and separate the wood and the metal.
And we're not like a fire department.
These linemen don't stay here on the yard 24 hours.
So when we're done for the day,
we typically will come in a little early because I don't want a
lineman to get called out and say,
the bucket truck that he needs to use at two in the morning is
low on diesel, or it doesn't have transformers on it.
So we're always trying to stay ahead of the game by having
everything ready,
first responders.
David Latona:
How does that everyday work make a difference when a storm does
hit,
when there's a large emergency,
an outage, restoration?
Cody Glascock:
A lot of the times when you have severe weather come through,
a lot of it's unavoidable.
You'll have a tree way out of our right-of-way,
and it's green.
You would have never thought uproot,
rip power lines down, and it's a major event.
So we try to stay ahead of the game by,
like I said, adding sectionalizing equipment,
breaking our circuits down. So we're always trying to just
shorten the duration of outages and just keep things under
control the best we can. But you know how weather is,
I mean.
David Latona:
Talk to me about the sectionalizing equipment.
Tell me about that technology and how that helps.
One, how it helps your guys do their work day-to-day.
But then also, how do they contribute to making suggestions where
this equipment should go to provide
better service for our members?
Cody Glascock:
So a sectionalizing equipment, the best way I can explain it is
like a light switch,
midspan. I tell a lot of people when I do schools with children,
elementary schools,
and I go speak to the kids, I tell them it's just like Christmas
lights.
We run our Christmas lights in a circle.
It's in, most of our feeds are in a loop.
So if I get a tree that tears one span of wire down,
I can feed it from two different directions.
Well, if you don't have sectionalizing equipment,
the people are going to stay out of lights up until the first
switch. So we try to mitigate that by,
say, if I have a section of wire,
say, 3 or 4 spans going through a heavily wooded area,
and it's off road,
it's hardly accessible. Well, I'm going to try to put
sectionalizing equipment on each side of them woods.
You're trying to get ahead of it,
and you're using your best guess with the experience we have.
The linemen in the field are the ones that fight it.
So when they're fighting something constantly like the same
circuit,
and you keep hearing the same issue,
that's where I step in and say,
well, man, let's have a talk. What do you want to do?
What do you think? And that engages them.
And I feel a lot of people don't understand that these circuits
are so detailed and complex.
A co-op lineman has to know his system like the back of his hand.
That way, when he's driving to that outage,
he's already been given a pole number,
and he's thinking the whole time,
well, I got to get ahead of this and open here,
and I got to go check here.
David Latona:
They want to address the issue that has caused the outage,
but they also want to get as many folks on,
even while that line is still damaged or that pole is still
broken.
So that sectionalizing allows you to do that.
Do I understand that right?
Cody Glascock:
We typically aren't going to start changing the pole.
We're going to start sectionalizing and getting lights on. We
want to get as many customers on as possible,
and then we're going to address the damage.
David Latona:
I got you. And that makes sense that these guys would you say 48
circuits that you all have?
Cody Glascock:
At Central.
David Latona:
In your district. So do you assign those?
Like this particular lineman or service man is responsible for
this area of the central
district?
Cody Glascock:
Yes. We call them geo areas. I have four service men,
and Central is broke up in four areas.
Two on the Baton Rouge side and two on the Livingston side.
It's written like what circuit,
where they stopped.
So it's lines. Like I said, technology is advanced.
When a customer calls in and a CSR creates a service order,
it auto assigns to that geo area.
So that service man, there's no guesswork.
Now servicemen can cross lines,
say if a service man has a job that's a little too large for him
to tackle, his neighboring servicemen will come give him a hand.
But yes, they are assigned and held accountable to the shape and
condition of their area.
David Latona:
So we'll get a little deep here,
a little philosophical.
Is that all right?
Cody Glascock:
Yeah, let's do it.
David Latona:
What makes a good lineman at DEMCO?
Cody Glascock:
I would say determined and self-motivated.
You've never heard a lineman say,
well, we just can't pick this wire up,
too bad. Like, we have to make it work.
So they have to be very determined,
creative, think outside the box sometimes.
How are we going to get this wire across this pond,
you know?
David Latona:
And probably not scared of heights?
Cody Glascock:
Most of them aren't. I would say they're probably some are,
but they like you said,
they're determined. They overcome it.
David Latona:
Hey, then they're more apt to ensure that that safety equipment
is on correctly and hooked up just right,
to save them. So for our members listening,
what do you want them to understand about the work that your
crews do every day? Not the outage stuff,
but the everyday stuff.
Cody Glascock:
The everyday stuff. We are trying to,
first of all, keep this system running and provide reliable,
safe power to our customers. Like you were saying a while ago,
we were discussing customers calling in.
You want our customers to actually,
you know, people say we take it for granted.
Well, that's what we want. We don't want them thinking all the
time.
I wonder if my lights are going to go out. Like they shouldn't,
it shouldn't even be a thought in their head. They just turn a
switch on, their power comes on. So that's what my crews daily
are doing.
We're working on maintenance. We're providing a service to the
public,
and we want them to be just customer satisfaction at its best.
David Latona:
And you got the right guys out there to do that.
So it's easy for us consumers and members to think about power
when it's off.
That's easy to think about. But this gives a real look at
everything that goes into keeping it on:
the reliability, the inspections,
the familiarity with their circuits that they're in charge of.
I would say the bond they have with one another to understand how
they're working together.
So, Cody, we do appreciate you taking the time to walk us through
that.
And most importantly for the work you and your crews do every day
to serve our members.
That wraps up today's Co-op Conversations with DEMCO.
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If you like what you heard, leave us a review and like and share
the episode with a friend.
For Cody Glascock, I'm David Latona.
Let's keep the conversation going.