If you’re like me, you may have an instrument hidden underneath your bed or tucked behind coats in your closet, which you keep thinking you’ll take up again. But, you haven’t. Or maybe you’ve imagined signing up for fiddle camp to learn the tunes your granddaddy played in Pope County, Arkansas. But, you haven’t.
What was once a flat work site in April is now home to a new substation powering Pine Bluff’s Highland Pellets biomass facility.
“I first learned about volunteering to trim trees in our national cemeteries from Rainbow Treecare, the company that founded the Saluting Branches organization,” said Robert Rowlette, Russellville vegetation management operations coordinator. Rowlette thought participating in the nonprofit’s day of service would be a great way for Entergy Arkansas to honor veterans and to give back to the communities where we live and work.
Entergy Arkansas is investing $1.7 billion dollars across our territory between 2016 and 2018 in generation, transmission and distribution improvements to the state’s electrical infrastructure. In fact, throughout the year, projects are taking place in every county where we do business to enhance reliability for our customers.
I’m standing alongside veteran instructor Todd Wheat as he smiles with appreciation as an agile apprentice is already about 25 feet up a 35-foot utility pole. Other recruits are in various stages of the task–from examining their equipment to being five feet off the ground. The instructor and I are outside the designated pole-climbing training yard at Baseline Safety and Skills Training Center in Little Rock. The young man was busy kicking gaffs, metal pole-climbing spikes, into the pole and any observer could see his joy in discovering how well he took to a task most people outside the utility brotherhood would consider unnerving.
It’s never too early to introduce children to the wonders of the utility brotherhood.
Chris Robertson, construction supervisor for Hot Springs, says volunteering last year with the United Way made such an emotional impact that his team wanted to commit to community action on an annual basis.
Word’s gotten around that our incoming president and CEO is a bit of a company history buff. During the last seven months, Rick Riley has crisscrossed our territory for 28 meet-and-greets at service centers and office buildings. From Harrison to Hot Springs to Helena and El Dorado to Blytheville, clerks organized the food, and fellowship and conversation ensued.
Air Force veteran Corey George once spliced and maintained cable for critical military communications. The no-nonsense 34-year-old is now a seven-year (and counting) veteran on Entergy Arkansas’ team and recently deployed on a critical communications mission for the utility: visiting his son Caden’s elementary school for a safety show-and-tell during career awareness month.
Entergy employees in operations, engineering, construction and project management have completed a significant project to improve reliability and support economic growth in southwest Arkansas. Demonstrating Entergy’s core values of focusing on customers and aggressively looking for better ways, the team delivered the completed project ahead of schedule and below the project cost estimate approved by the Arkansas Public Service Commission. The collective effort and innovation epitomize Entergy’s mission to create value for customers by striving for reasonable costs and providing safe, reliable service.