Injured lineman headed home from hospital

EKLUTNA — A lineman severely shocked in a recent power line accident has been released from a Seattle hospital.

“They’re discharging him this afternoon, if they haven’t already, and he’s just going to stay down in Seattle and get a checkup in seven days and hopefully he should be fine,” Jason Hodges, vice president and spokesman for Northern Powerline Constructors said Friday afternoon.

The accident happened at 2:45 p.m., Wednesday. Northern Powerline Constructors is the main contractor building big transmission lines to serve the Matanuska Electric Association’s Eklutna Generation Station, a natural gas power plant currently under construction.

Hodges said that the lineman was in an aerial lift device — the type of equipment sometimes colloquially called a “cherry-picker” — when the accident happened. The crews were re-routing existing power lines from the Eklutna hydroelectric plant into the switchyard for the new Ekltuna Generation Station.

He said the lineman is 35 years old and a “young lineman” in terms of his experience in the field. He has been with the company for five months.

MEA Spokeswoman Julie Estey said the challenge for Northern Powerline Constructors has been made more difficult by unseasonable warm weather that melted ice roads the company had planned to employ over the winter.

“They’ve been doing an amazing job stringing lines between there and here,” she said.

MEA has structured the work of building the power plant and building the transmission lines to serve as two separate projects. In January, a worker for another contractor, this one Haskell Corporation, which is working on the power plant, was injured when he was pinned between lift equipment and a door.

Emergency responders from the Chugiak Volunteer Fire Department reported to the area Wednesday to help the lineman, ferrying him out of the area he was working on all-terrain vehicles and loading him into a helicopter that flew him to Anchorage, where he was sent on to Seattle.

Hodges said that folks around the office were relieved when they heard the lineman would be released from the Seattle hospital. The mood around the office had been pretty somber, he said.

“It has been for the last couple of days. Northern Powerline Constructors is a family-owned company, so it’s been hard on everyone,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.