Hurricane Katrina

Twenty years ago this month, Walton EMC linemen packed their trucks and headed south into one of the most devastating natural disasters in American history. Athens Banner-Herald reporter Wayne Ford accompanied the team to document their mission, publishing a powerful series of articles in September 2005 under headlines such as “Power to help,” “Another dark night” and “Pulling together.” Recently, Ford returned to interview these same linemen for a special retrospective, and what emerged were memories that remind us why the cooperative spirit runs so deep.

The crew that made the eight-hour, 268-mile journey to Pearl River Valley Electric in southern Mississippi included lineworkers Greg Pannell, Randall Pruitt, Ronnie Browning, Lee Chandler, Carlos Thompson, Eric Ellington, Scott Cole, Jason Blankenship, James Wise and Josh Fuller, led by foreman Gerald Malcom. They arrived in Hattiesburg to find devastation beyond imagination.

This was Fuller’s first storm response, and it was quite an introduction. “I was too young to drive any of the trucks since we were working out of state,” he recalls with a laugh. However, age didn’t stop him from jumping into one of the largest mutual aid responses in the history of electric utilities, working alongside crews from cooperatives nationwide.

The personal sacrifices were significant. Pannell was expecting a child back home, while Pruitt’s daughter was graduating from high school. Yet when the call came for mutual aid, both answered without hesitation.

Ford’s original articles captured the staggering destruction: trees snapped 20 feet up at the trunk, oaks and magnolias uprooted leaving gaping holes in the ground, power lines twisted across highways, substations flooded and entire distribution systems needing complete reconstruction. But the crew also discovered something unexpected in the midst of catastrophe: hope and human kindness in the most unlikely places.

The local “birddog” — an employee familiar with the system who helps mutual aid crews navigate — showed up wearing leather chaps. When our guys asked about them, he simply said, “They’re for the rattlesnakes.” It was just one of many reminders that this wasn’t ordinary linework.

Despite having no power for weeks and limited communication, residents kept trying to offer our linemen food and drinks. The impact of their mission became clear in the voices of those they helped. As Ford reported in his original coverage, when the Walton EMC crew arrived at the home of the Franklins — an elderly retired couple in remote Mississippi who had been without power for weeks — a woman walked out of the house and said to foreman Malcom: “Hey, Hon. God comes in a white truck.”

The scale of work was unlike anything they’d seen. “At one point, every pole you could see had a man on it,” Pannell said. “Linework doesn’t change, just the technology does.”

As Ford wrote in his September 2005 coverage, the work was methodical yet relentless — replacing broken utility poles, restringing power lines, working into the night by generator-powered lights. The work was also different because there were no underground utilities to navigate, which allowed crews to focus purely on rebuilding the grid from scratch. Ellington summed up the team’s spirit perfectly: “If there was a job to do, this bunch right here could get it done.”

This spirit of mutual aid isn’t just history, it’s woven into who we are as electric cooperatives. When ice storms hit Georgia, when tornadoes strike neighboring states, when floods threaten communities across the Southeast, co-ops respond. It’s one of our founding principles: cooperation among cooperatives.

Our crew showed what it means to put community above personal convenience, working around the clock in dangerous conditions, away from major family moments, because they understood that when one cooperative suffers, we all do. When the next storm comes, and it will, we’ll be ready to help and ready to receive help, because that’s what cooperatives do.

Athens Banner-Herald

SEE IT: Walton EMC linemen look back at Hurricane Katrina 20 years later (Athens Banner-Herald)

WATCH IT: Walton EMC linemen who helped rebuild after Hurricane Katrina look back 20 years later (Athens Banner-Herald)