Welcome to season three of MTE's Plugged in podcast.

This season we will continue to explore the world of electric vehicles.

Whether you're a seasoned EV driver or you're just beginning your journey into electric vehicles, this podcast is for you.

For a more enhanced experience, be sure to watch the video version of this podcast that will be linked in the show notes.

Hello, everybody, I'm Brandon Wagner and welcome to this edition of MTE's Plugged in podcast.

I'm sitting here with Amy Byers and Mike Diggs.

Amy, how are you doing?

I'm doing great and I'm real excited about this podcast, Brandon.

Today we have with us Mike Diggs.

And Mike is a dedicated lineman and serviceman at mte and he plays a critical role in promoting safety through MTE's hotline demonstration trailer.

Since its inception in 2015, this 45 minute educational and interactive demonstration has been a cornerstone of MTE's commitment to member and employee safety.

Welcome to the podcast, Mike.

Thank you, Amy.

So before we get started and talking about all things with the demonstration trailer, tell us a little bit about yourself and how long have you been at mte.

So I've been here at MTE for a little over six years.

I grew up in West Tennessee in Jackson.

I live almost 48 years within a five mile circle.

And we picked up and moved to Middle Tennessee to relocate our family and I was lucky enough to get a job here at mte.

And like I said, I've been here almost a little over six years in January.

Well, that is great.

And so I know you have recently taken over the, I don't know, what would you call it?

You're the guy that does the speaking part, the speaking part of the demonstration.

You're the emcee of everything that's going on.

I'm the least bashful.

There you go.

Tell us a little bit about the history of the trailer, how it got started.

I said earlier, it started in 2015.

And then tell us about your new role and what you do and just a little bit about the trailer.

So we had a couple of guys years ago, we used JT and S, which is job training safety here in the state of Tennessee that we do our training from.

And we had some guys go to a school and they had the demonstration trailer.

JT&S has one of their own and.

And they had it there when it was actually Greg Hale and Jerry Bartley had seen it there and it's like the light bulb come on to both of them and said this would be A great opportunity for MTE to reach out to their members.

And so they started the concept of building one on their own.

And I think they added.

Jeremy Roberson also went with them.

They went to Huntsville and looked at one.

They went to Sesquatchie Valley and looked at theirs and kind of built one off the concept of theirs.

And like I said, I came here in 2019, so I've been involved with the trailer here for six years.

But I also done the demonstration trailer at the utility I came from.

We had one as well.

So I done this same role for them.

And then Greg was outstanding on this.

And Greg retired and I was just lucky enough to step in and try to fill his shoes.

So what are.

What are people going to see, like if they came?

You know, I know you're.

We do a lot of events.

We're at the fair, we make several fairs, we make the rounds.

But what do people just kind of explain a little bit about what they're going to see.

So it's a broke down demonstration.

It's a small scale of a power line.

It actually has transformers, it has the wire and the air.

It has the fuses that we fuse a line with.

And we have some different scenarios we can do where we can put a squirrel on the line and make that squirrel fault out like an everyday, not a real squirrel.

And we have where a wire gets on a car and shows how that car is energized and you need to stay in that car unless you're in some kind of danger.

It's very good for the community wise to see.

We also take it to several contractors, like water contractors that do a lot of digging around our overhead power lines to show them if they get a piece of equipment into the power line, what needs to happen.

It's a very educational piece of equipment, Mike.

Whenever I'm meeting somebody new and they ask me where do I work and I tell them MTE Most of the time people say I saw the demonstration trailer.

And they always talk about how good the presentation is.

And I think what they're saying is it's very authentic.

Like you all are not just going through the motions.

You, safety is a personal conviction of yours.

Can you tell me a little bit about why you have that personal conviction for safety?

So I was raised where your occupation may not be the best in the world, but it is your occupation.

So you need to be the best at your occupation no matter what it is, no matter where you work, you need to know everything about what you are doing.

I can do line work, but I can't do brain surgery.

Brain surgeon can't do line work.

He studied for that.

I studied for this.

And the safety side of is that to me that I want me and all my guys to go home the way we came in this morning.

The safety side of electric, it's not dangerous to us because we know what we're doing.

But you don't know what someone had on their mind that day.

The guy standing next to you in the bucket, we all got to be watching out for the next guy.

Whether you're on the ground looking up at me to holler, hey, wait, you got your bucket on this or whatever.

It takes all of us to be safe.

And that has always been a priority of mine.

And as I was telling Amy earlier that I have a son in this industry too now.

So to watch my son go home at night, you know, I don't want him to do something that I taught him over the years.

He's seen my dad do this.

It was okay to do that.

I want to be a good leader to him, not only to my co workers.

Absolutely.

And something you mentioned that reminded me, I used to go and talk to school kids about safety and stuff, and we would talk about Lyman.

And, you know, you mentioned the comparison of the brain surgeon versus the Lyman.

And what a lot of people don't realize is that to be a lineman, you don't just be, you don't just, I'm going to be a Lyman and I'll be full out in a year.

You know, it's like about a six year.

I mean, it takes about as long to become a full fledged lineman as it does to become.

And with the industry changing every day with new technologies, it's a learning aspect every day.

Where the equipment I used 20 years ago, we don't use today.

The equipment is better now.

But if you don't take the aspect of trying to learn the new technology, you're still stuck in the old age.

And so when you're working on a planned construction project or something, that's one that's a level of danger and safety that you have to be focused on.

But a lot of times, you know, the next thing people tell me when they find out I work at Middle Tennessee Electric is, well, I had this storm and we thought we were going to be out for so long, but you all had us back up and running so quickly.

So that's a whole nother.

It is.

It plays a different aspect to having a scheduled, hey, we're going to move this line to.

Now that line has got a 60 foot oak tree laid in it.

So it ain't like just picking that line up now.

It's like putting the pieces of a puzzle together to take it back apart.

Yeah.

And how do you kind of balance, you know, obviously you all are working fast because you get everyone back up so quickly.

But you also have to be focused on safety during that.

So how do you balance that?

It's a teamwork.

It's from when you start a new guy here and you start teaching him the right way to do things.

From the beginning.

It's kind of like an engine.

Some parts don't even think about what's going on.

They all hit together.

Well, when everybody's on the same page, when you start your tailgate and you go over, hey guys, this is where the line's dead at.

This is where we're going to ground at.

Don't get outside this area, stay in this area.

And everybody is on cue then.

And then everybody, everybody just falls into place.

I mean it's like a well oiled machine, but if you don't have communication to start out with, it goes haywire.

So kind of redirecting a little bit towards.

Obviously you all, you do this every day.

You know what you're dealing with.

The demonstration trailer is sort of geared towards audiences that may be experiencing a downline or something.

And they don't do it every day.

So what kind of reactions do you get when you're presenting this?

Things that they haven't, maybe they weren't aware of when you're talking with them.

The big thing is like I always laugh.

And when you watch the weather channel when a storm comes through and they're talking about there's transformers blowing up all over town.

Well, that loud bang is not a transformer blowing up.

It's usually a fuse which isolates our lines.

Something gets into it, that fuse blows.

It's kind of like the breaker in your house operating.

When you overload the kitchen outlet or whatever in your breaker trips, you go to the garage and have to reset it.

Well, that fuse blows, it isolates that line and we have to come out and physically reset that back after we find what the problem is.

And people laugh because they all think it's, you know, we pull into a neighborhood tonight and yeah, I heard a transformer blow up.

Well, we very seldom have transformers blow up.

But the concept of people don't really realize what until you can physically see a voltmeter that's got 7,000 volts on it that that seven, you can't see electricity, so people don't really know if a line's dead or not.

And the concept of how we put a ground on before we ever touch that line.

I think one of the things I always.

I love always like watching y'all, and I really like watching the people watch what y'all are doing, too.

But one of the things I think is interesting is when you do the tree, you know, you'll put a tree branch on there and you'll see it smoke and it burn.

And I think that's really good for our members to know as well, because nobody wants their trees trimmed, but they don't realize how dangerous it is to not let us trim them.

That's right.

And also the time factor that that tree could be, you know, if we'd have cut it this summer, you may not have been out of power this winter or the next summer when that spring storm comes through and that green limb gets loose.

Right, right, right.

So what are.

Well, this kind of piggybacks on what you're saying, but what are some misconceptions that you've.

When you're doing this trailer and you're talking to people and maybe they're like, oh, I didn't realize that.

But what are some misconceptions that people have about electricity?

So in the industry, some of the big misconceptions of my years of being in the industry, I think, are a lot of people say I live in an underground neighborhood.

That storm comes through, it's not really going to affect me.

Well, all underground is fed off overhead somewhere.

You know, it eventually is overhead somewhere, whether it be us or tva, that just because you're in an underground subdivision don't mean an ice storm is going to affect you underground as well.

Looks pretty in your yard.

You don't have wires going across.

But underground is a whole lot harder to troubleshoot because I can drive down the street and see if your wire is down, but I can't tell if your wire is into and under the ground.

And it takes a little bit longer to repair underground versus overhead.

Troubleshoot it and repair it that side of it.

The next big misconception, I think, is that I can't drive out here.

Ain't like going into the kitchen and flipping the light switch.

When your lights go out in a storm, I just don't drive down the street and plug the cord back together and your lights come back on.

A lot of people think that that's how easy it is.

It takes some Preparation and some work and then there's also some time consuming parts of that.

Well, I think one thing I know we were talking about this earlier is especially when it's on the weekends or after hours, you know, it.

Sometimes it starts with the power goes out and we have to wake up the lineman that's on call to leave his family to come out to get that power back on.

And so like you said, it's not like we have a switch.

We have a lot of very sophisticated systems.

So in a lot of cases we can switch things around to get the power back on from inside.

But if it's something major, if a tree has taken down a line or something like that, you have to have boots on the ground.

That's nothing that we can do with, you know, just switching around electricity.

So, you know, we've got a call, we've got to wake up whoever the service guy is and say, hey, come on, he's got to get a team because one person can't reset a pole, you know, and all of that just takes time.

And so, you know, and you have.

To have the lead guy will usually head out to the job and kind of get bearings on what's going on.

But then the rest of the guys go to the office and kind of load up.

You know, we're not at home with a truck that's got a pole on it or a transformer on it.

So there is some time consuming parts of that.

I think we respond very well, very quickly for the area we cover.

But like you say, yes, it is 2:00 in the morning, you get called and you may only got in bed at midnight from the call you just got off of.

So to wake up and try to get your bearings straight to get there sometimes is a challenge.

Yeah, but I mean we do really good like you said.

I mean I really get more compliments.

And it's funny what I have seen on Facebook, like our MT Facebook page.

A lot of times if someone complains, oh, my power was out for too long or whatever it is, usually our members are the ones that will get on there and come to our defense and they'll be like, hey, wait a minute, you're wrong about this or whatever.

So I think we do a really good job of taking care of our members.

Yeah.

Even like where we stage things, there's a lot of prep work that I know that you all do to make sure we have poles in different locations so you don't have to drive out to the middle of somewhere and find out I need this pole.

I got to go all the way back.

There's places and there's that team that you were talking about and that communication.

There's also part of that team is in the control center and they, they have systems they can look at to kind of help identify.

Like a pole has how many parts to a pole.

I mean we're talking about even bolts and arms and specific.

Right.

Like every pole is unique and so there has to be a list that's unique to rebuild that pole.

And those poles are classed with certain guy wires to make sure that they're structurally sound.

I mean, so you're, you know, I don't think unless you do this a lot.

And I don't.

What gets me is when I watch the demonstration trailer.

I feel like I know this and then I always walk away learning something new.

And we do have.

All of our trucks are stocked really well with the small parts and pieces.

But the oddball stuff, whether it be a transformer or cross arms or the big essentials.

Yeah, we have to pick up at the warehouse or like you say, we do have them at different locations.

We have some transformers, our substation in Fairview.

Just because that's a long haul, you get down into a bad transformer, you don't have very far to get one.

Because we got some stage there ahead of time.

If we know bad weather's coming, we're preparing for that.

We already are saying, okay, we're going to have some bad weather.

This has the potential for possibly tornadoes or straight line winds.

We have a team on standby.

We have, have looked at our supplies.

We're ready to hit the ground running.

But it's those wrecks in the middle of the night that can happen, that we're not prepared.

We're much more prepared to respond when we know it's coming.

The storm systems, the ice storms, but it's the things we can't control, the drunk drivers or whatever that can do just as much damage sometimes as straight line winds.

And that's where you've got to go out there.

You've got to assess the situation.

You've got to come back and get all the, you know, it may even be a little bit longer because, you know, we're not expecting that to happen.

Yep.

And as I talked to Amy earlier, that sometimes the.

When we pull in, we're.

We're nice to the neighbors as they come out and address us.

But when I stop at 15 different houses to say what I've got going on, that's 15 minutes of work I could have been doing.

Sometimes you have to designate one person to do that while everybody else tries to get to the job.

Which is a good plug for.

If anyone doesn't have the app.

I know there.

There's a lot of communications.

It's a little more efficient.

Right.

We push that out to folks, and then the folks in the field can just keep moving.

And so.

Yeah, and our outage map.

And our outage map.

That's right.

You can get access to that through the app or through mte.com and you can see where these outages are.

You can see if crews have been dispatched and that type of thing.

So maybe the request would be for our members to get the information through those means, let you get out there and do your job and get the lights back on as quickly as possible.

So one final question before we let you leave us today.

Is there one key thing that you would like people to understand about electricity?

So a lot of times we get the concept of, hey, you took my lights out.

We roll out to a job.

We only take your lights out if there's something in danger of us or if it's going to speed our job up tremendously.

If it's going to make our job 30 minutes faster, we're probably not going to take your lights out.

If it's going to make our job four hours faster, we're probably going to take your lights out for a little bit to get the work ahead of time.

If your meter's not turning, we're not making revenue, so we're not cutting you off just so we can do our work.

We get that.

A lot of times we roll in and it's like, hey, you took my lights out.

I didn't take your lights out.

The squirrel took your lights out or the car took your lights out.

You know, I'm here to try to help you get them back on.

The majority of the time, and I may be wrong, so correct me if I'm wrong.

But the majority of the time when you're out there working the lines, you're working it hot.

That's correct.

You're not.

No one's without electricity, which is much more a dangerous situation for you, but you're risking that so that we're not turning the power out for.

That's right.

Nowadays, no one wants to be without their lights, not even me.

You know what I mean?

Your lights go out.

Everything.

We rely so much on it nowadays, that.

And from where I came from, the utility I came from, we were a very industrial heavy community, probably 65, 70 factories in Jackson.

So there was not the option of taking lights out.

I mean, it's the same way here.

You know, you have data centers and you have banks and you have, we do have some industries here, factories as well that can't be out of light.

So you have to do what you can to keep them on and work as safe as you can.

So when we do take the lights out, it is an educated choice, not a guess.

We took them out for a real reason.

I gotta make one more comment.

Your hat.

The lineman rodeo from.

For our listeners who may not be aware, this is a team that they have, I guess, a competition every year.

I think there's some other things throughout the year too, but our team regularly places amongst the top in the nation.

Can you talk a little bit about that and some of the safety competitions involved with that?

So, and actually this year a good thought is we're actually hosting this year.

It will be here in the city of Murfreesboro in the last weekend of May.

It come about years ago, the original rodeo come about in Kansas City from a bunch of old linemen out there that wanted to see who could be the best at what they do.

You know, wanted to have bragging rights.

And so the Tennessee Valley kind of took that on and come off of it with their own rodeo that we do here now, which is anybody that the valley is inside the valley, whether you be in Kentucky or Alabama, as long as you're part of the valley, you can compete in it.

And everything is based on your safety side of it, your score first.

If I do it in three minutes but done it unsafe and got a two point deduction and you've done it in 10 minutes but got 100.

Your 100 beats my time.

So the aspect behind yes, time is a crucial part of it being fast and being good.

So we do really well every year from the Apprentice all the way through to the seniors.

We've placed and won every aspect of it over the years and we really enjoy doing it.

It's awesome.

Well, Mike, thank you so much for being here today.

I think this has been really a great podcast.

Very informative.

I know I've kind of really enjoyed this one.

So thank you for being here.

Thanks to everyone who is out there listening today.

If you want more information about the Hotline demo trailer, you can go to mte.com hotline safetydemonstration and we'll also include that link in the show notes for everybody.

And for more information on MTE's Drive EV programs or the EV Car Club.

You can visit drive.com or email us at evcarclub@mte.com.

until next time, plug in, power up and drive safe.