One of Sturgeon Electric’s Colorado commercial construction teams was recently honored by M.A. Mortenson Company, its customer, for being an “outstanding partner in safety.”

The Adams County Midway project team was recognized in October with a Mortenson Star Award for Best in Safety. The project, which is part of larger Riverdale Regional Park improvements, involves rebuilding the medium voltage loop, installing site lighting, three utility yards and telecom/data/security infrastructure. Riverdale Regional Park hosts the annual Adams County fair among other community events. 

Leaders of Mortenson’s project team nominated the Sturgeon Electric team composed of Project Manager Nate Silva, General Foreman Eduardo Escobedo, Foremen Braden Bloom and Josh Loeffler, Project Engineer Levi Tapia, Journeyman Wireman Bowdon Brumbleow, and apprentices Caden Miles, Axel Parra, Daniel Casillas, and Jorge Ortiz.

The nomination letter said, “Sturgeon Electric has consistently demonstrated a strong commitment to safety, showing up to our projects with practices that align seamlessly with Mortenson’s standards and culture. Their active participation and professionalism on the job site set them apart as a true leader in safety.”

“In addition, Sturgeon Electric has been a dedicated participant in the Mortenson hazard recognition program, consistently following internal processes while meeting and exceeding Mortenson’s requirements. Their unwavering commitment to ensuring that every team member goes home healthy and safe makes Sturgeon Electric an outstanding partner in safety,” the nomination letter continued.

Team Leaders Receive Award in Private Meeting

Mortenson presented the 2025 Best in Safety Star award to the leaders of the project team on October 2, at the project site.

Silva, Escobedo, Tapia, as well as Senior Project Manager J.D. Chenoweth and District Manager Norberto Cruz all attended the private award ceremony.

“As a team working for a company that prides itself in safety, an award that recognizes that we are going above and beyond other subcontractors that Mortenson works with is an immense honor,” Silva said.

Mortenson presents its annual Star Awards in eight categories to acknowledge and recognize the contributions of their subcontracting partners.

Kudos to the entire Midway Project team for earning this distinguished safety award.

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Sturgeon Electric Company (Sturgeon Electric) achieved another safety milestone this year.

They reached the highest tier of safety certification from the Board of Certified Safety Professionals (BCSP), a global non-profit with more than 50 years certifying technical competence in safety.

Boasting more than 100 BCSP-certified employees, Sturgeon Electric attained Diamond status with BCSP again in May 2025. The ranks of certified individuals include foreman and general foreman who provide field supervision, as well as safety personnel.

BCSP defines Diamond status organizations as those that “champion employee or member credentials, an investment that encourages training, promotes safety awareness, and gives them a competitive edge.”

Josh Barber, Sturgeon Electric’s Vice President of C&I, said, “Sturgeon Electric takes pride in its reputation and history of leading the industry in safety.  Sturgeon invests in making sure that we continually provide the best possible training and development for our employees to ensure the safety and health of everyone within our sphere of influence.” 

Most of the certified Sturgeon Electric employees hold the Safety Trained Supervisor Construction (STSC) credential. Eligibility requirements include a minimum of 30 hours of safety, health and environment training, and multiple years of construction experience to qualify to take the two-hour exam which covers many safety issues including hazard identification and controls, safety program implementation, emergency preparedness and more. Applicants typically prepare for the exam over several months.

Once the certification has been obtained, a person can recertify every five years if they maintain eligibility by leading or taking 30 hours of safety training.

When asked why the company prioritizes and encourages employees getting those certifications Barber added, “We have recognized the value of the STSC certification as a method of validating that our various levels of supervisors have the necessary amount of knowledge and understanding around safety and health practices, standards, regulations, and hazard identification in the construction industry.”

A Long-Term Commitment to Safety

Sturgeon Electric has encouraged BCSP certifications for its personnel for more than two decades. Regional Safety Manager Zach Valdez recalled earning his STSC more than 20 years ago when he was a foreman with the company and before he ever worked in the safety department.

He explained that the company understood the importance of frontline supervisors having safety training and knowledge back then and anticipated how it could have a positive impact on safety in the field.

The number of certified employees grew over time, as has support for the program. Valdez and Administrative Assistant Monica Baez currently serve as Group Account Managers (GAMs) to help manage the large number of employees already certified, and those working toward certification, or in need of recertification. They support candidates through the certification process, manage renewal fees and hold periodic test prep training for them.

This latest milestone is just one of many safety achievements in recent years which are the fruit of the company’s long-held commitments to safety education and training across its ranks. This year, the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA) recognized five Sturgeon Electric districts for Safety Excellence recognition and four districts for Zero Injury.

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Safety, like any other profession, is never stagnant.

There’s always room for improvement, more to learn, and modern work practices to develop and implement.

The MYR Group corporate safety training team stays at the forefront of health and safety, developing training and materials that are critical not only to crews in the field but also to safety professionals themselves.

For 2025, a key emphasis for the corporate training team was providing technical, hands-on training for safety professionals, many of whom don’t come from an electrical operations background. This workshop teaches them the current electrical theories, work standards, and practices that Transmission and Distribution (T&D) crews receive, tailored for safety professionals of all experience levels.

“We wanted to give our safety specialists more technical training and dive into the details of how and why we do the grounding and bonding equipotential zone (EPZ) and insulate and isolate training with our crews,” MYR Group Director of Safety Training Steve Foster said. “As a result, when our safety specialists are out on job sites, they can understand much more technically what’s happening and are better able to assess the grounding or bonding scheme, recognize when something doesn’t look right, and ask good questions of the crew.”

When Kyle Gawloski joined the company last January, his first initiative was to get out in the field and gain a better understanding of work practices across MYR Group’s subsidiaries, how safety specialists interacted with crews, and identify areas for improvement.

As a journeyman lineworker himself – now serving as MYR Group’s safety training manager – Gawloski was uniquely positioned to spot the gaps in understanding between safety specialists and the crews in the field.

“That was my overall goal,” he said. “We can’t expect to become better and work safer and have quality crew observations if our safety professionals don’t fully understand where to look.”

When the time came to present his findings and offer solutions, Gawloski was thrilled by the reaction and willingness of the company’s leadership team to invest in his ideas for improvement.

“It was so incredibly empowering that MYR Group listened to me as a newer employee saying, ‘Hey, I spot an area for improvement, but I’ve also got potential solutions that I can implement to make us stronger,’” Gawloski said. “The response was, ‘Great, go do it.’ It’s rare at large organizations for that to happen, so it was very empowering to be able to do this.”

Gawloski developed an in-depth, technical training workshop for MYR Group safety professionals to teach them modern electrical theory and work practices while also simulating real-world situations to build a better understanding and appreciation of the tasks lineworker perform every day.

Using the MYR Group training facility in Alvarado, Texas, 13 safety professionals from multiple MYR Group subsidiaries attended a two-day workshop that combined classroom learning and interactive tabletop demonstrations with practical, hands-on exercises in the training yard.

The first day focused on EPZ bonding and grounding, led by Gawloski, with the second day shifting to insulate and isolate principles, facilitated by Safety Training Manager Brian Sharp.

Each safety specialist wore rubber sleeves and gloves and performed simulated tasks a lineworker would do in the field. This included establishing earth grounds, finding minimum approach distances, and handling insulated “hot sticks.”

While it was important to reinforce the theories learned in the classroom with practical application, the idea of recreating these scenarios, Gawloski said, was to put them in a lineworker’s 3-foot world, help them understand how things like ergonomics and body positioning are critical, and realize where shortcuts are often taken because of the inherent challenges that come with the work environment.

“I think it was an eye-opening experience for all of us on how easy it is once you’re out in the field doing the job, and you have all these other factors, to lose sight of the normal procedures and the safety compliance aspects,” E.S. Boulos Safety Manager Michael McLaughlin said. “We were making mistakes, and it was like, ‘Oh, I haven’t done this before. Why am I doing it this way?’ You get that real-world experience, which was needed to help us fully grasp what it’s like out there.”

These “golden nuggets” of insight, as Gawloski calls them, can go a long way in building stronger relationships with crews and creating a lasting impact.

“A big part of safety is relationships, and safety specialists need to take the time to build relationships with those in the field,” Foster said. “But it’s still difficult to walk up to anyone who’s a lineworker and question their work practices when you haven’t done it. So, this workshop was all about giving them knowledge, and hopefully, that will lead to the confidence for our safety specialists to ask questions that they might not have asked otherwise.”

The corporate safety training team will hold the workshop twice a year – once in the fall and once in the spring – with all newly hired safety specialists required to attend the training as part of their onboarding process within the first six months.

“The whole training felt more like a conversation than a lecture,” McLaughlin said. “There were a lot of great conversations, and we were able to talk things through with a group of people who have such expertise. It was just a great workshop – no matter your experience level going in.”

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Utilities around the country are faced with many electrical system needs including interconnecting clean energy projects such as solar fields to their power grid. MYR Group companies are delivering these projects successfully in many parts of the U.S., including the Midwest.

MYR Group subsidiary MYR Energy Services (MYRE) recently completed an engineer-procure-construct (EPC) project in Marysville, Ohio to serve this purpose for a new solar development.

MYRE led the project which included upgrading a bay of the Marysville substation, erecting two new transmission monopoles and stringing 345kV wire from the substation to the point of interconnect, and constructing a 765kV dead-end lattice tower to raise the existing transmission line to accommodate the route for the 345kV line.

They brought in fellow subsidiary The L.E. Myers Co. (L.E. Myers), which operates across the Midwest, to perform the transmission line construction due to their extensive experience and familiarity with the customer’s systems.

As the EPC manager, MYRE led the project and worked with an engineering partner to design and engineer all three facets of the work, ordered the materials, and L.E. Myers performed the transmission and substation construction.

Through collaboration, they successfully met the customer’s project requirements and managed challenges effectively.

“I think anytime you can keep scopes of work under the MYR Group umbrella it is advantageous because we can work better and more transparently together,” MYRE Operations Manager Harrison Casey said.

Team Manages Unique 765kV Scope Addition Despite Supply Chain Hurdles

Originally the Marysville EPC project didn’t call for any 765kV transmission work, but when the need arose, MYRE and L.E. Myers found the necessary solutions for this uncommon transmission voltage.

While the project was in the engineering phase, a route adjustment by the solar developer prompted the additional need for a 765kV double dead-end lattice tower to raise the height of existing transmission line. The existing line was too low to provide enough clearance for the 345kV interconnect line to run beneath it.

Director of Engineering – EPC Tracey DeKraker joined MYRE as an engineering manager during the engineering phase as the 765kV scope was being added. She explained that it is harder to design and engineer the addition of a tower into an existing transmission line than to design a new section of line. Getting it designed so that the line sag would be correct once the new tower raised the line was a challenge the team worked together to overcome.

The procurement team also faced challenges due to long lead times and material shortages. They overcame this difficulty by finding a tower manufacturer that could produce the specialized lattice tower in time, as long as they ordered well in advance.

L.E. Myers Safely Constructs and Energizes New 765kV Tower

L.E. Myers’ experienced line crews laced, erected, dead-ended the wire on each side of the tower and energized the new 765kV double dead-end tower over the course of 29 days, starting in September 2024.

Currently, working with 765kV is less common in the U.S. – although that may change over the next decade if regional transmission organizations move forward with plans to build new 765kV backbones for the electric grid.

L.E. Myers’ Construction Manager Scott Ross explained that construction of 765kV transmission is also more difficult than lower voltages because the tower must be taller and the components including conductor wire are heavier. New rigging, spreader bar, and slings were acquired for the project due to the length and weight of quad-bundle conductor and the insulators which had 32 bells each.

The tower also had to be laced onsite near the existing, energized line – requiring grounds on all the steel and maintaining the minimum approach distance (MAD) to perform the work safely. A spotter worked to ensure crew members did not encroach on the MAD.

The laced sections had to be carefully arranged on the ground so the crane could lift them when the time came. Once the outage arrived for the existing line, L.E. Myers relied on MYR Group’s fleet to provide the 350-ton crane needed to erect the steel lattice tower. The bridge section alone was a 36,000 lb. lift that had to be raised to top the 125-foot tower.

Once the tower was fully erected, the L.E. Myers crews installed stringing blocks on the tower and transferred the wire into dead-end positions. They put rigging on to catch the wires once they were cut from the middle and formed the 8 dead-end assemblies (four in each direction, per phase). Lastly, they installed the jumper assemblies and insulators for each of the three phases.

Pre-planning was essential to safely performing this work. During pre-planning, the team examined the line sags, calculated the weight of everything the crane would have to lift (including picking up pieces of the tower) and determined the proper tooling, rigging and equipment they would need to safely complete each step.

That planning, combined with excellent communication, experience working with multi-bundle wire, and all the safety processes and procedures in place during the construction phase, enabled them to successfully complete the 765kV work safely, without any recordable incidents or first aids.

“Their safety record has been impeccable, they are great at doing ‘all stop work,’ and always doing good catches,” MYRE Project Manager Jacob Tulachka said of working with L.E. Myers.

Upgrading the Substation and Adding the Interconnect Line

The Marysville substation is large, with many transmission lines coming into it. For the solar developer to tie-in at this station, the utility needed upgrades to a 345kV bay in the substation where the connecting transmission line would run. They also needed a short stretch of 345kV transmission added connecting the substation out to the point of interconnect.

L.E. Myers removed substation equipment in the existing bay that needed to be replaced and installed the new circuit breaker, CTs, CCVTs, lightning arresters, a new motor operated switch, all associated control cabling, and two new control panels in the existing control house.

They also performed the 345kV transmission construction which consisted of two new monopoles and new 345kV conductor from the substation to where the solar developer’s 345kV transmission line will tie-in in the coming months. 

L.E. Myers safely completed this work in November 2024.

Project Details: Marysville IPP 765kV Tower and Other Upgrades

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MYR Group’s culture is built on the prioritization of safety as a core value.  Recently, the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA) recognized all eight of our NECA-affiliated subsidiaries—Huen Electric, Harlan Electric, Sturgeon Electric, Sturgeon Electric California, CSI Electrical Contractors, Inc., High Country Line Construction, Inc., E.S. Boulos, and L.E. Myers—for their outstanding achievements in Safety Excellence and Zero Injury. 

Within these MYR Group companies, 14 districts attained Recognition of Achievement in Safety Excellence, and nine districts were awarded Recognition of Achievement of Zero Injury for their performance in 2024.

NECA’s safety performance recognition program stands as a prestigious acknowledgment, spotlighting companies with exceptional safety and health programs. Member companies maintaining consistently low OSHA recordable injury and fatality rates, paired with internal safety practices exceeding basic compliance, often earn this esteemed recognition.

Achieving both Safety Excellence and Zero Injury status reflects our company-wide dedication and concerted efforts across all districts, and this year’s record numbers show that these efforts are more successful than ever in keeping our crew members safe.

Our experienced foremen, reliable workforce, and proactive safety department work together to maintain procedural integrity and ensure company-wide adherence to safety standards.

Our safety department plays a crucial role in proactively managing cases and identifying potential issues before they escalate into incidents or injuries. This proactive approach supports our districts in maintaining stable workflows and procedural integrity, ensuring alignment with safety expectations throughout our operations. 

2025 NECA Recognition of Achievement in Safety Excellence Winners:

• Harlan Electric: Harrisburg, PA
• Huen Electric: Columbus, NJ
• Sturgeon Electric: Phoenix, AZ; Tucson, AZ; Henderson, CO (Line, Transportation, & C&I); Las Vegas, NV; Salt Lake City, UT
• Sturgeon Electric California: Chino, CA
• L.E. Myers: Marshalltown, IA
• E.S. Boulos: Auburn, ME; Westbrook, ME
• CSI Electrical Contractors, Inc.: Santa Fe, CA

2025 NECA Recognition of Achievement of Zero Injury Winners:

• Harlan Electric: Harrisburg, PA
• Huen Electric: Columbus, NJ
• E.S. Boulos: Auburn, ME
• L.E. Myers: Marshalltown, IA
• High Country Line Construction, Inc.
• Sturgeon Electric: Topeka, KS; Las Vegas, NV; Seattle, WA; Tucson, AZ 

Congratulations to all our districts on this remarkable achievement and for upholding safety as the cornerstone of our company. 

See all 2025 Recognition of Achievement of Zero Injury winners

See all 2025 Recognition of Achievement in Safety Excellence winners

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Snapshot

In response to Eversource’s increasing need for energized electrical transmission and distribution project work, MYR Group subsidiary Harlan Electric developed a live-line certification program to provide these capabilities.

Since initiating barehand live-line work for Eversource in 2020, Harlan Electric has successfully executed numerous energized projects, including the NECA award winning X116/Z119/S188/R187 Structure Replacements project (or “X116 project”). This overhead transmission project included 252 structure replacements across four different 115kV lines, with the majority of replacements performed under energized conditions. Harlan Electric completed the complex project ahead of schedule and with zero injuries.

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Client Introduction

Eversource is New England’s largest energy delivery company, serving more than 4 million customers in Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Problem

Eversource’s service territory includes some congested, urban areas where it can be difficult to obtain line outages to perform transmission and distribution linework – especially in New Hampshire. Outage constraints have led to Eversource New Hampshire’s growing need to have this type of work performed under energized conditions – including complex transmission rebuilds like the “X116 project” – to ensure reliability for their customers.

This complex project required 227 of the 252 structure replacements to be performed while energized.

SOLUTION

Harlan Electric has provided electrical construction services to Eversource since 2005, building a trusted relationship by providing quality work, exemplary safety, and completing projects on tight schedules.

Recognizing their customer’s shifting needs, Harlan Electric spent two years developing a live line certification program to provide these capabilities. They partnered with a recognized industry organization, ESCI, to develop a training and certification program. Harlan Electric’s first class of lineworkers was certified to practice live line and barehand work in 2020. By training and certifying crews for energized work, they have helped meet Eversource’s growing needs and have been selected to tackle complex, energized projects for the utility.

In 2022, Harlan Electric was awarded the “X116 project.” The rebuild was needed due to problems with existing wooden laminate poles. Replacing 252 structures across four transmission lines on the same right of way, would be no easy feat – especially with 227 being converted while energized.

Work was scheduled to begin in June 2022 and to be completed in February 2023, but Harlan Electric set a goal to complete the line construction even sooner and met it.

Making the project even more challenging, the state’s Fish & Game agency issued new protections for several rare, threatened or endangered species shortly after the project was awarded. It would be the first Eversource project to comply with the new wildlife protections.

Harlan Electric worked closely with Eversource to determine what changes and procedures would be necessary for compliance and ensured its access and environmental controls subcontractor built and maintained those requirements.

Essential protections included additional timber access matting, turtle tunnels, silt fence, straw waddle, and operable fences stationed at every work pad entry. Harlan Electric’s crews worked hand in hand with full time environmental monitors in the field each day and performed visual inspections around each piece of construction equipment prior to operation.

To safely and successfully deliver the project, Harlan Electric carefully planned out and coordinated the switching of lines being worked on by crews (2-3 live line, 4 drilling and 4 access subcontractor crews). Each day, they discussed the working procedures for every task planned, identifying location hazards ahead of time and maintaining the awareness necessary to prevent unplanned outages.

“As one of the main corridors in a population­-dense area that’s five circuits wide, we had to be cognizant of what circuits we were working on and how close they were to other circuits. Our team needed to be especially mindful of what was behind and alongside them when positioning our bucket trucks and other equipment,” Harlan Electric District Manager Chris Lenahan told Line Contractor magazine.

To work most efficiently, Harlan Electric pre-drilled holes in the ground, and support crews delivered all materials to the work sites before the live-line (structure) crews arrived each day.

The structure crews would set the new structures, fill around the pole, frame it up and set it, install the davit arms and transfer all the conductors over to the new structure using conductor line lifters. The line lifters provide more freedom of movement than hotsticks. After conductors had been transferred, the crews would transfer the optical ground wire (OPGW). Lastly, they would dismantle the old structure.

Support crews would handle the removal so that the live line crews could move on to the next structure replacement.

Keys to performing the energized work safely included following established procedures that are practiced and discussed daily before the work begins. This includes conducting a thorough job brief and work plan, adhering to barehand procedures, and understanding roles and responsibilities.

RESULTS

Harlan Electric completed the project while maintaining exemplary safety, protecting wildlife and accelerating the project schedule, earning them a 2023 NECA Project Excellence Award for overhead transmission.

The project successes included:

• Zero unplanned outages
• Zero recordable incidents and no property damage
• Complying with brand new measures to protect wildlife
• Completed the project 2 months ahead of schedule, despite beginning construction later than planned to comply with new environmental regulations

In addition to the project excellence award, the Harlan Electric district earned the NECA Zero Injury and Safety Excellence Awards for the full year, which included the work on the “X116 project.”

CONCLUSION

By understanding their customer’s needs, collaborating closely with the utility, and quickly adapting to the new environmental requirements, Harlan Electric delivered construction, environment and safety excellence on the project.

“We want to extend our sincere thanks to the project team at Eversource New Hampshire, who gave us a lot of flexibility in terms of the schedule we developed for the four circuits,” Lenahan said. “We appreciate the great communication and coordination they provided and thank them for having confidence in us and giving us a chance to hit it out of the park for them.”

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Several years ago, MYR Group’s safety leadership recognized this phenomenon.

They sought to reduce these common incidents by developing a refresher training program called Back to Basics. The goal of the training program is to better prepare our craft employees so they are well equipped to conduct work safely and reduce their chances of errors.

“I would describe Back to Basics as an effort to consistently deliver refresher training to our workforce across the entire spectrum of craft workers – from superintendents to first-step apprentices,” MYR Group’s Director of Safety Training Stephen Foster said. It also supports the safety department’s mission which includes delivering industry leading safety performance.

Field employees come in qualified and trained, often with specialized knowledge and extensive training, but they are still humans who can make mistakes – making refresher training an important element of our overall safety program.

Group Vice President Danny Gessman has supported the Back to Basics program from multiple leadership positions within MYR Group and considers it an important “investment” in our people and their safety.

“We are a mobile workforce, which means there are always new people among the ranks. We can’t assume people came up in the trade and are instilled with the same safety culture we have,” Gessman said.

District Manager Jeremy Miller of The L.E. Myers Co. finds it very beneficial for his crews because the customizable content is very relevant to their daily work.

“It’s taking that extra step to make sure the crews get the training that they need and to ensure we are not just being reactive, but also proactive,” Miller said.

“The field employees stay engaged, they want to hear more. At the end of every training they are excited and want to know what we will cover next.”

District Manager Jeremy Miller

The Evolution of Back to Basics

When the program first started, the safety department identified a few common injury types, prepared training on those topics, and each MYR Group company providing transmission and distribution electrical construction services held an annual day of Back to Basics safety training focused on those subjects.

Over time the program’s content expanded considerably and by 2024, the training program was rolled out across the MYR Group organization. MYR Group subsidiaries providing commercial and industrial electrical construction, including our corporate fleet teams, saw the value of the training and were anxious to adopt the Back to Basics training.

The company also developed a robust observation program where the safety professionals visit jobs sites to see how work is being performed. Then they discuss their observations to identify trends, areas for improvement, and training gaps to address through various safety training programs, including Back to Basics.

Developing a program that suits a wide variety of training needs for crews performing a range of services from transmission and distribution, to commercial and industrial, led to a robust program, with various sub-topics. And Foster said deciding which topics to include in the program wasn’t always easy.

“We sometimes have to stop and say ‘wait, this is Back to Basics. This is refresher training for people who have been trained, to refresh their knowledge and skills because as humans we have a lot on our plates,’” Foster explained.

The format has also changed to better fit the needs of operations teams with a menu-style customization. While some core topics are mandatory, local leadership can also choose from a list of available training courses to strategically select topics that best fit needs they have identified through the course of their work.

“The field employees stay engaged, they want to hear more,” Miller said of his employees’ experience with Back to Basics. “At the end of every training they are excited and want to know what we will cover next.”

The Importance of Leadership Involvement

MYR Group and its subsidiaries are committed to remaining industry safety leaders and this success requires commitment and continued support from all levels within the organization – especially all levels of leadership.

From top to bottom, the program has continued support from MYR Group leaders.

Leadership involvement is just as vital to an effective refresher training program like Back to Basics as providing relevant, engaging content.

“It simply means more to field crews when a district manager or operations manager is there to help introduce the training, present the content or to answer questions,” Foster explained.

Miller agreed saying, “I think it’s important for me to get in front of the field crews for Back to Basics and let them know this information is important to our success, not just short-term but long-term, and in making sure they get to go home every evening to their families.”

Miller manages a team in Pasadena, Texas with about 260 individuals working in the field providing several scopes of work. The size of that team makes it difficult for everyone to stop work at the same time for a Back to Basics training day, so they usually meet in multiple, smaller training groups, but Miller still tries to ensure he is there for each and every one of his employees’ Back to Basics training.

All of this ultimately benefits the customers we serve by providing them with a qualified, well-trained workforce focused on performing their work safely.

“I think our customers see that when it comes to safety, we have a structure. We’re not just checking a box and saying we’ve done it. We are continuously focusing on the basics of safety, and when a gap or trend is identified, we go back to refresher training again. And we have an avenue to address it across the entire organization,” Gessman said. “Generally, a safe job is a productive job and a quality job. All around, projects are better when they are done safely.”

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Ensuring safety is essential for our people and our utility customers. MYR Group’s transmission and distribution (T&D) operations teams are improving safety measures by implementing industry-leading rope inspection processes and adopting AI technology to further strengthen these efforts.

Why rope inspection matters

Rope is an integral tool in electrical transmission and distribution work, used in wire pulls and transmission haul backs on projects of all sizes and voltages.

If rope breaks on the job during a pull, the resulting dropped line can cause anything from minor injury, property damage and unplanned outages, to severe injuries and death. Efforts to prevent rope failures are critical to keeping both our lineworkers and the public safe.

Developing best practices for rope inspection

Years ago, MYR Group set out to prevent these kinds of potential rope failures from happening by developing and implementing a rope inspection process for our transmission and distribution operations. This process, which began in 2016, has evolved to establish industry-leading best practices for rope inspection. Most recently, we have enhanced these practices by incorporating AI technology to improve the visual inspection process, ensuring even greater reliability and safety.

cJosh Holland is integral to MYR Group’s Fleet department. He oversees the critical aspect of fleet and asset management for all rope used in wire stringing across MYR Group’s companies. Together, the rope inspection team inspected more than 5 million feet of rope in 2024 and expect to continue at that pace annually.

“I want every wire pull to be a safe pull. Some of my best friends are lineworkers and whatever we can do to help protect them in the field is our main goal,” says Holland.

The team visually inspects all rope once a year, ensuring that no rope remains in the field for more than a year without being inspected.

It is also inspected every time it changes locations within MYR Group. For example, if a rope is being used by Sturgeon Electric in Colorado and going to be sent to Harlan Electric for a project in the Northeast, it goes to the rope inspection team in Indiana for inspection in between.

These best practices are applied to all rope the company owns and anything that comes with rental equipment before it is ever sent out to a job site.

While the industry standard is 3-to-1 strength for a safe workload, MYR Group’s rope inspection technicians use a higher 3.5-to-1 ratio. This means rope on a 4,000 lb. puller would need to meet the threshold of 14,000 lb. break strength for MYR Group to approve use of the rope.

Embracing technology to strengthen our rope inspection processes

Implementing regular inspections of all rope was already making work safer and reducing rope failures when Holland learned about a new high-tech product to improve rope inspection. A company called Scope developed an AI system to detect damage and measure the quality of a used rope compared to a new rope.

This innovative technology is a device with multiple cameras that rope can be pulled through as the cameras image the rope. It uses AI technology to analyze the condition of the rope, as compared to brand new rope, and produces a “percentage of new” rating, as well as noting the locations of splices, debris, damage and anomalies at points along the rope.

Holland and the entire rope inspection team was influential and “played a crucial role” by collaborating with Scope to pressure-test and validate the technology’s damage detection capabilities, helping it “achieve a high level of accuracy.”

“As one of the first adopters, MYR Group helped pressure-test the system extensively before its public release. By utilizing the Scope system to predict the break strength of line segments, then testing those predictions against actual break strength measurements, MYR Group provided valuable feedback that enabled continuous improvement. Their hands-on involvement allowed Scope’s AI models to be iteratively fine-tuned, ultimately achieving reliable accuracy, ensuring the system was highly effective for real-world use,” Scope wrote on its website.

Following the pressure testing phase, the team implemented the technology in 2024 to successfully augment their visual inspections.

If the SCOPE machine identifies rope conditions that are 65 percent of a new rope’s spliced break strength (or lower), that portion of rope is retired. If the majority of the reel has rope that tests below this threshold, the entire reel is replaced and any rope from it that tests above the threshold is saved for future usage.

The use of Scope’s AI-driven technology has bolstered their processes by providing “an extra set of eyes on the rope,” and providing documentation of the quality of each rope that is second to none.

It also provides time savings in situations where visual inspections discover a section of rope that looks worn or prompts concern. That rope can be fed through the SCOPE machine and more quickly identify the point where the rope quality meets our strength standards again. Then technicians can cut a sample of the section and break test the strength to confirm the results.

“Implementing AI technology for rope inspection has been a game-changer for us. Not only have we significantly reduced rope failures and improved safety, but we’ve also set a new standard for efficiency and best practices in our industry.”

MYR Group Director of Specialty Equipment Josh Holland

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Mike Collins distinctly remembers those meetings in the early days.

Harlan Electric Company (Harlan Electric) launched its live-line barehand training program from scratch in 2019, and it’s fair to say the initial training space in Methuen, Mass., was far from spectacular. The office was cramped, and there was certainly no immediate access to training structures.

“If people could see the meetings that we had when we first started in this tiny office with a handful of people,” says Collins, Harlan Electric’s superintendent, who was instrumental in building its energized program, “compared to where we are now – they’d be astonished.”

Where they are now is the Live Line Academy training facility located in Alvarado, Texas, roughly 40 minutes south of Fort Worth.

The Live Line Academy facility is the culmination of years of planning and coordination between Harlan Electric and Great Southwestern Construction (Great Southwestern), two MYR Group subsidiaries that perform energized line work for customers in the Northeast and West Texas.

Each company independently started its own live-line barehand training program in 2019, but worked together over the past few years to design and build a first-class training facility and program to certify lineworkers from any MYR Group subsidiary seeking to perform energized construction for its customers.

In January 2025, the Live Line Academy officially graduated its pilot class, which included eight lineworkers from Harlan Electric and Great Southwestern, each completing the 10-day program and achieving the 90-percent pass rate on the 50-question written exam.

“We saw the students really invest and engage with the technical material, with the weights and forces and calculations,” Live Line Academy Director of Training Billy Walsh said. “Not everyone grasps that material. And that’s a credit to our amazing trainers. They made sure everyone was comfortable and understood the concepts.”

Collins and fellow Harlan Electric superintendent Justin Evans served as trainers for the Academy’s pilot class, two lineworkers with years of experience performing energized work in their careers. Students learn the planning, organization, execution strategies, written procedures, and task hazard analysis needed to perform barehand work.

The program combines classroom learning with practical training in the yard, which is only a few hundred feet away. The Live Line Academy is a challenging certification process, and lineworkers who attend must understand complex electrical theory, perform formulas, and demonstrate a strong understanding of the work to graduate.

“We didn’t make the Live Line Academy program easy,” Great Southwestern Regional Manager Ryan Little said. “There are no softballs here. The material is challenging, the structures are going to be difficult to work, and it’s going to be real-life scenarios.”

The facility itself is an extension of the Great Southwestern apprenticeship training yard. Leaders from Great Southwestern and Harlan Electric partnered to design the expanded facility, combining their experience to ensure every relevant scenario could be taught and trained.

The yard includes a 345kV lattice tower, steel and wooden monopoles, H-frame structures, and dead-end as well as 138kV wooden structures with energized distribution underbuild. Two Timpson units enable the facility to train on energized lines with controlled voltages, simulating real-world scenarios without the danger of electrical shock.

“I’ve been to a lot of training facilities throughout Canada and the U.S. In terms of a facility that meets every requirement that you’re ever going to need, and then how it’s all constructed and put together and the technology behind that,” Walsh said, “I don’t know that there’s any facility as unique as what we have.”

Operational leaders from around MYR Group were invited to tour the facility and see the Live Line Academy pilot class in action, coming away impressed with the level of detail and quality given to every aspect.

While currently only Harlan Electric and Great Southwestern offer energized construction, the Live Line Academy facility enables other MYR Group companies to develop the capability without the restrictions the other two faced while building out their programs.

“For our subsidiaries that don’t have energized experience, but are looking to get this type of work, this is the perfect, controlled environment to bring your crews down and start training,” Little said. “They’ll gain real-life experience, with all the safety measures in place to protect them, to teach them what they need to go out and perform this type of work for their customers.”

Not all regions of the country perform energized work today, but as load demand and complications from outages continue to increase, more utilities across the country may turn to energized solutions. Electrical contractors who can offer their customers uninterrupted service through safe live line work become an appealing partner.

“You have to take the first step,” said Eric Lauriha, Sturgeon Electric’s president of Transmission and Distribution. “Even though barehand work is a small percentage of the work we do daily across the industry, I think eventually it will become more prevalent.

“If we want to have a full box of tools, we have to get on board and we have to be ready for the opportunities when they come.”

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Roosevelt Park was once the beautiful first sight travelers glimpsed of Detroit as they disembarked the iconic Michigan Central Station which opened in 1914. But for many decades the train station and park sat empty and deteriorating until a city revitalization project that began in 2022 changed all that. The effort breathed new life into this public space.

Harlan Electric Company (Harlan Electric) supported the park’s transformation and beautification by performing all the streetlight work in and around Roosevelt Park for the Detroit Public Lighting Authority (PLA).

One of the city’s goals with the park project was to reunify neighborhoods around the park and create a safer, community-friendly space for residents and visitors – making streetlighting a crucial element of the project.

Streetlighting is essential for safety and to create an attractive space that feels inviting to the public. For the park’s revitalization, Harlan Electric crews installed all the interior and exterior streetlighting for the park, which included 50 light poles.

All power for the lights was fed underground, requiring installation of foundations, 7,500 feet of trenching and boring to accommodate more than 15,000 feet of conduit, wire pulling, and pole setting. The lighting fixtures were the same decorative fixtures used throughout the adjacent historic Corktown neighborhood.

With most of the electrical construction team born and raised in Detroit, they took pride in working to beautify this historic park in their home city.

Successfully Meeting Firm Deadlines in A Short Timeline

This was a high visibility and time sensitive project. Harlan Electric began construction in April 2023 and needed to have all interior streetlight work completed by late June 2024 – in time for a public, official re-opening ceremony with the mayor and other city officials.

Harlan Electric successfully met the deadlines through excellent internal project planning. Project manager Max Dade consulted his general foreman and foremen, who are native Detroiters, with the right expertise for the project and knowledgeable about the city. Together, they determined the best work methods and accurately assessed equipment and labor needs.

Dade and his team also worked closely with the PLA, as well as other city government departments, city engineers, city inspector and other contractors performing other work on the site. The team proactively communicated and brought solutions when challenges arose.

Harlan Electric accurately anticipated there would be many underground unknowns while working in one of the oldest parks in Detroit. To overcome those uncertainties, they confirmed with local utilities before digging to ensure all lines they encountered were dead and cut off, and that nothing the crews encountered during the digging work would be a safety hazard.

 The crews carefully removed large rocks, cut out and disposed of old, non-working sprinkler lines they came across and worked around other former underground systems to properly install all the underground infrastructure for the street lighting.

To prevent any damage to the park grounds, including the new sidewalks and sod which were being added simultaneously, Harlan Electric utilized concrete buggies to transport concrete to the pour sites for the needed foundations.

The team was committed to staying on schedule, knowing what had to be accomplished each day. They consistently found solutions when unforeseen changes came up – such as shifting to work in a different section of the park due to other contractors’ needs.

Safety performance was top notch on the project, with zero injuries on the project thanks to the vigilance of team members and experience of the foremen.

Pre-Apprentices Assist with Roosevelt Park’s Transformation

Harlan Electric relied upon labor resources of IBEW Local 17 journeymen, apprentices, and pre-apprentices through the firm’s unique partnership with the PLA for the Roosevelt Park project.

The PLA began the Public Lighting Authority Nurturing Talent (PLANT) program in 2020 to offer more Detroiters, especially minorities, a pathway into the electrical trade.

Born out of the PLA’s desire to expand opportunity for locals, the collaboration with Local 17 and contractors (including Harlan Electric), is an innovative program which trains individuals from the ground up, helps them obtain the necessary credentials and certifications to apply for an apprenticeship, and prepares them for that application and interview process.

Working under experienced foremen on this project, PLANT pre-apprentices were able to gain experience framing forms for manholes and hand holes, trenching for underground conduit, wire pulling, operating a mini derrick, rigging and setting streetlight poles and more. All of which set them up for future apprenticeships and trade success. It also gave the pre-apprenticeship the opportunity to work on a flagship location in Detroit. Years from now they’ll be able to look back with pride on their involvement in Roosevelt Park’s transformation.

Related Project: Roosevelt Park

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