By Lenore Vickrey
When an ice storm snaps power poles, a tornado tears down miles of power lines, and hurricanes plunge entire communities into darkness, thousands of families wait for the lights to come back on.
But in homes across Alabama, another kind of waiting begins.
For every lineman heading into the storm, there’s a family staying behind — a wife putting children to bed alone, a mother checking the outage map, a phone lighting up in the middle of the night. They know the routine. When disaster strikes, their husband or father may be gone for days, sometimes weeks, helping strangers get their lives back.
In recognition of Lineman Appreciation Day, which Alabama celebrates April 15, we talked to wives of eight linemen from our 22 Alabama rural electric cooperatives, to learn more about the challenges of managing life at home when the head of their household is gone.
Chelbie Mobley, a high school science teacher, has been married to her husband, Dylan, a lineman at South Alabama EC, for seven years. Although he’d been a lineman for a few years before they married, she remembers vividly the times when he’s had to be gone from the house, including when she was pregnant with their first child, Mary, and another when she’d just given birth to their second girl, Mabry. That was in September 2024, when Hurricane Helene, the deadliest hurricane to hit the United States since Katrina in 2005, slammed into the Florida panhandle.
She was home with newborn Mabry, only about two weeks old, when he called her from work: “Hey, there’s a hurricane. You care if I go?” Knowing that her parents were nearby for support, and that the extra money would come in handy, Chelbie agreed he should go. “Obviously he did not have to go, it wasn’t a requirement, but when you look at just having (had) a baby, and the money, and all the things, it’s really hard to turn it down.”
Dylan joined crews from 19 Alabama cooperatives in a massive mutual aid effort to restore power to rural areas of Florida’s “Big Bend,” which took weeks. “It was complete devastation,” says Chelbie. “Most of the places they went to, he was gone for a week, then came home, stay a week, and turn around and go back the next week.”
It becomes your lifestyle
Emily Varner, a dental hygienist in Greenville, knows what it’s like to have her husband away from home, especially during special family times. Ty Varner, a journeyman lineman, has been with Pioneer EC for 12 years. During the fall of 2020, when it seemed like one hurricane or severe storm after another battered Alabama and the Gulf Coast, he had been working in Louisiana after Hurricane Laura, when their daughter Raegan was born six weeks early on Sept. 9.
“He got home the night before I went into labor,” Emily remembers. “What a way to be introduced to being a lineman’s daughter, being born at the tail end of a storm!” When they brought their newborn home after a week in NICU, Hurricane Sally was wreaking havoc along the coast, Ty got a call from the co-op. “They said, ‘We know you’re bringing your daughter home, but we might need you. So in two or three hours, he was out working again.”
A year later, Ty would miss Raegan’s first birthday party when he was called out to work another storm. “I’m telling you,” says Emily, “she has been a lineman’s daughter since she came into this world.”
Living a small community like Greenville, the Pioneer linemen and their families are close, she adds. “You build relationships because you’re all in it together. A lot of us have kids around the same age, a lot go to the same schools, we ride in the Christmas parade together. It’s like a little family which is really sweet.”
Being married to a lineman also means you learn a lot of the lingo, Emily notes. “So when he calls me and says, ‘I’ve got a broke pole,’ I know what that means, that it’s going to be like three hours. There have been several times we’ve gone out to eat and he gets called out and we have to leave.” Often they take two vehicles, just in case. “It just becomes
your lifestyle.”
A sense of pride
Kaitlyn Dillon, whose husband, Trey, has been a lineman at South Alabama EC for 10 years, knows what it’s like to adjust your home life around dad’s work duties. The couple lives in Honoraville with their three young sons, and Katelyn works as an esthetician in Montgomery. Trey takes their youngest, six-month-old Woods, to day care in Troy, but if he’s called out on a job, it changes everything. “It’s definitely hard,” she says. Thankfully, she has family members nearby who can help.
Still, when the phone rings in the middle of the night “and he has to jump up, get dressed and leave,” it’s an anxious time. “I feel like I’m constantly looking at the phone to see where his location is, to see when he’s on his way back,” she says. “And I always have the outage map up to see where the outages are.
“I hate it when he’s called out, but then I know how much he means to the families he’s going to help, especially when he’s going to work like the disasters and the hurricanes. There’s a sense of pride with that.”
In February, Matt Moody, a lineman at Tombigbee EC for 17 years, was among the Alabama linemen who were gone for three weeks helping restore power during the ice storms that hit Mississippi. The work was some of the most dangerous and difficult he’d seen, with power lines embedded in frozen ponds as the storm destroyed more than 8,000 power poles and 4,700 miles of power lines.
But back home in Hamilton, his wife, Mandy, a nurse, was going through a trauma of her own. He had not been gone a week when she was hospitalized with dangerously low potassium levels, later found to be caused by her acid reflux medication. She was in the hospital three days until her levels stabilized, and Matt managed to get back to see her briefly before heading back out. Normally, their son, Brodie, 19, would be at home to help with their 10 beef cows, but since he finished high school last year, he works on the road as a welder. Mandy was responsible for the home front and their farm.
“I hadn’t been in the hospital since I had Brodie,” recalls Mandy. But she understands how important her husband’s job is especially since he’s a senior lineman at Tombigbee EC. “He’s seen so many ice storms and damages over the years, but he said he’d never seen an ice storm like this one.”
Like Emily, Mandy can explain to others why it sometimes takes a long time to get power restored. “I can talk power lines with the best of them because I’ve been around it so long,” she says.
Dawn Perry’s husband Phillip has been a lineman at Dixie EC 26 years, most of their married life. Their children are now grown, but when he first started as a lineman he would have to dash out whenever he was on call, sometimes missing family time, Dawn recalls. Once at Christmas, the phone rang when their children were seeing what Santa Claus had brought them. “You have to answer that?” she asked him. “Yeah, I’m outta here,” he replied. Their kids would be crying and asking ‘why is Daddy leaving?’ but they survived.
“It’s been a rollercoaster, “she says, “It was hard, but you just pray, pray, pray.” Phillip “loves his job,” she adds. And if he’s not out working an outage, he’s at home worried about all the guys who are out there. “They’re like brothers.”
‘What he’s meant to do’
While the unpredictability of a lineman’s schedule can make it hard on his family, for Stephanie Christensen, whose husband, Stephen, has been a lineman at Baldwin EMC for 20 years, it has become normal. “This is what they’ve grown up with. They know that their dad might miss birthdays or holidays, but they understand why. I feel like it’s actually taught them a lot about serving others and taking responsibility, especially when they were younger.” They have a son, 26, and daughters ages 17 and 9. “Being the family of a lineman, it’s a family commitment, because when he’s called out, sometimes you don’t have much of a warning. We just hold things together back at home because we know that he’s doing what he’s meant to do.”
As a OB-GYN nurse practitioner for the underserved community, Stephanie knows what it’s like to serve others, as her husband practices that daily. “He’s so humble and quiet. He never makes a big deal about what he does,” she says. “It’s so cool as a wife to watch him quietly serve others. It’s just powerful to me.”
Trey Dillon holds his youngest son, Woods, alongside wife Kaitlyn and their other sons, George and Beau.
Moriah Miller, a career tech teacher at Albertville Innovation Academy, has been married for 10 years to Joey, a lineman for Marshall-Dekalb EC for 20 years. “He tried to forewarn me when we were dating” that his schedule could be unpredictable, she says, “but you don’t know until you get married and you’re living that day-to-day life.” She and their six-year-old son, Jesse, count the days until Daddy’s home and they can resume playing his favorite pastime, building LEGO sets.
Even local events can separate Joey from his family, such as when a car hits a power pole, or house fires when firefighters need power lines to be de-energized. “The weekend before he left (for Mississippi) there was a car wreck and he left around 8 or 9 that night and they didn’t get done until about 6 the next morning. They had to work all night.”
Like many of the wives we talked to, Moriah keeps up with her husband’s location on her phone and checks the cooperative’s outage map. If linemen post photos on Facebook, the wives often share them, especially if they gone out on storm restorations. “Then we all kind of compare notes,” she says.
Newlywed Kamryn Hill has only been married to her Clarke-Washington EMC lineman husband, Cody, for a year, but even while they were dating, she got a taste of what life would be like with him being gone. He was sent with crews to help respond to storm-related outages in Georgia and Florida, and then most recently, Mississippi.
“For the first few days, it’s kind of nice because you can watch what you want on TV, and you don’t have anybody interrupting you. But then it kind of gets lonesome and you’re like, ‘When are you coming home?’” Kamryn, who works as a corporate accountant, tries to Facetime with Cody every day when he’s out of town, and if she needs anything, her parents live across the road in Grove Hill.
In the early days of their marriage, she says, “It was challenging, because you’re not used to having another person there, and then you’re getting woken up in the middle of the night.” But she’s learning what every lineman family eventually learns.
“It just comes with the territory.”
