BY JOSH P. CROTZER
Lindsey Magaha knows the risks when her husband, Gavin, leaves in the middle of the night to restore power during an outage. What she didn’t fully appreciate, until she started coming to the South Carolina Lineman’s Rodeo, was just how much training and trust go into bringing him home safely.
Journeymen events require crew chemistry as Levi James and Bret Timmerman work atop a pole while Gavin Magaha secures a rope on the ground.
“He can tell me about his job all day long, but it’s hard to grasp what the day-today actually entails,” says Magaha, whose husband is a lineman with Little River Electric Cooperative. “It’s a really eye-opening experience to watch them in action and see what a day is like in their life.”
Sponsored by The Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina, the annual rodeo mirrors the challenges lineworkers face when they are working with energized lines. This year’s event, hosted by Black River Electric and Santee Electric at the Clarendon County Industrial Park in Manning, drew more than 40 apprentices and 14 journeyman teams competing in events such as the hurtman rescue, overhead bell changeout and obstacle course.
While the rodeo lets crews showcase their skills, it prioritizes safety above speed, with strict judging criteria designed to reinforce essential daily practices.
“I want my lineman home to us at the end of every day,” says Lindsey Magaha. “Seeing that not only his crew takes things safe, but the whole statewide co-op family have safety as their No. 1 concern, that means a lot to me.”
Gavin Magaha, in his fourth year competing, knows that culture starts long before rodeo day. For example, Little River Electric’s outside crews practice the hurtman rescue exercise every year.
“It’s a procedure that we do a lot, just to make sure we’re fresh at it,” he says. “Hopefully, we’ll never have to use it. But if we do, you don’t want to have to thinkabout it. You just want to be able to do it.”
For this year’s competition, however, coops didn’t have the advantage of practicing specific events ahead of time. Competitors didn’t know what the events were until they arrived. For smaller co-ops like Little River Electric, that mystery leveled the playing field in the competition and reflects the unpredictability of the job.
“We don’t get a huge amount of time to practice like co-ops that have four times the number of employees,” says Gavin Magaha. “It’s like an ordinary day. We don’t know what we get until we get to work.”
Magaha’s journeymen crewmates were Levi James and Bret Timmerman. For them, the connections made with lineworkers from other cooperatives were the prize of the competition.
“We’re competing against each other, and we’re giving each other a hard time,” says Gavin Magaha. “But when you get done and sit down, everybody’s friends and everybody gets along.”
Rodeo day begins early for the Magaha family.
For Lindsey Magaha, the rodeo has become something the whole family circles on the calendar.
“It makes me proud,” she says. “It’s just a really fun atmosphere.”
The festival-like atmosphere included an opening ceremony that featured lineworkers from each participating cooperative and the Touchstone Energy Cooperatives hot air balloon. There were also live-line demonstrations, educating spectators about safety around power lines.
WIRE (Women Involved in Rural Electrification) hosted its annual bake sale to raise funds for the Chavis House at the Burn Centers of America in Augusta, a facility that has treated many injured linemen.
PHOTOS BY JOSH P. CROTZER
