Not All Heroes Wear Capes – Some Wear Hard Hats

MEET SOME OF THE TENNESSEE VALLEY’S PUBLIC POWER HEROES

With rain falling at a frenetic rate averaging nearly two inches per hour, flash floods swept across the city of Chattanooga on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 12, 2025. More than six inches of rain fell in just under four hours, with some areas of Hamilton County seeing up to seven inches, overwhelming drainage systems, turning roads into fast-moving streams, and creating terrifying situations that required multiple dangerous water rescues. According to Barbara Loveless, director of operations for Hamilton County 911, emergency operators fielded nearly 1,000 calls over a six-hour period that day.

In the midst of the storm, Fiber Technician Troy Plemons, EPB of Chattanooga, who was traveling between job sites, found himself stuck in a traffic jam along Interstate 24. Stranded motorists watched as I-24 became a river, the water rising from two inches to more than four feet in a matter of minutes. From his bucket truck, Plemons noticed a silver SUV being lifted and swept away by the roiling floodwaters. He and other drivers motioned for the woman inside to evacuate, but she was unable to get out. As the water climbed toward her neck, Plemons acted swiftly.

With the help of employees from Lawson Electric, who handed him an eight-pound boring bit he could use to break the window, Plemons waded through the powerful current toward the SUV. Video captured of the rescue shows him treading water, smashing a rear window, and pulling the stunned driver from the nearly submerged vehicle.

“She said thank you. That’s all she could say. It was just, ‘Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,’” Plemons recalled afterward. “I put her somewhere dry and let her sit in my truck. She said that would be fine. And she just said thank you. That’s all she could say.”

“I didn’t think there was any time… I just tried my best,” he added. “I feel like I was there at the right time. I’m thankful I was there to help that lady.”

Chattanooga EPB’s Plemons stepped into rising floodwaters without hesitation, but for many public power employees – especially line crews – confronting risk isn’t an exception … it’s part of the job they show up for every day. Still, there are numerous examples of public power employees from inside the Tennessee Valley and beyond, putting their own lives at risk to save others.

Another incident involving rising waters during a flood occurred in 2020 in Laurel Bloomery, an unincorporated area of Johnson County, Tennessee. Tucked into the rugged northeastern corner of the state, its steep ridges and narrow valleys leave little room for error when heavy rains arrive. After hours of intense rainfall, the ground gave way in places, triggering rockslides and sending fast-moving runoff into already swollen creeks. In one of those slides, a section of mountainside collapsed onto a pickup truck, knocking it off the roadway and into the churning creek below. The force of the water swept the truck 100 yards downstream before wedging it against debris with the driver still trapped inside.

Mountain Electric Cooperative employee Mollie Ingle was on a service call at a nearby home and joined first responders to help direct traffic. As emergency crews realized they didn’t have the equipment needed for a swift-water rescue, a decision was made to call on a crew of MEC lineworkers to assist. Ingle radioed for help, and lineworkers Rick Courtner, Cody Bryant, Dakota Tester, and Charlie Grindstaff headed to the scene with a bucket truck, not knowing what they would find.

When the crew arrived, they found the vehicle nearly submerged and the current too strong for first responders to safely reach. Using their bucket truck to maneuver out over the rushing water, the MEC lineworkers executed a daring rescue, pulling the stranded woman from the cab before the creek could take her under. Their quick thinking and calm reaction under pressure transformed what could have been a fatal situation into a powerful example of the courage and resourcefulness that define so many public power employees across the Valley.

Sally Snyder, MEC’s Director of Member Services, still recalls the moment vividly. “I remember this day very well and will never forget it, that is for certain,” she said. “I’m always proud of my coworkers, but this day was something for the history books. The pictures tell it all, and it was nothing short of a miracle — and God’s perfect timing — that they were able to save Mrs. Souder’s life that day.”

True to the humility shared by so many in the field, Courtner later reflected, “To us, we were just doing our jobs. We’re not in the rescue business, just flying a bucket every day. Flying a bucket to get someone out of a truck didn’t really seem like that big of a deal to us. I’m glad we were able to assist, but to me, emergency people are the real heroes — military and everybody else.”

Today, the crew members who participated in the rescue have each moved forward in their careers. Rick Courtner retired in July after 27 years of service to MEC, Cody Bryant now serves as line foreman, and Mollie Ingle is MEC’s GIS Coordinator — a fitting continuation for a group whose actions that day embodied the very best of public power.

The floodwaters in Johnson County showed how quickly a quiet mountain road can become life-threatening. But water isn’t the only force that has pushed public power employees into danger. In Sevier County, Tennessee it was fire – fast-moving, wind-driven, and catastrophic – that called lineworkers into action during the 2016 Gatlinburg wildfires.

The Chimney Top fire began on November 23, 2016 when two teenagers playing with matches sparked a fire along the popular Chimney Tops trail in the Great Smokey Mountains National Park. Around 50 acres burned in the first day or two of the fire before 40-mph winds whipped up, launching what investigators call a firebrand across Highway 441 to the base of Mount LeConte. The vegetation, already scorched dry from months of drought, served as kindling. At about 5:45 p.m. on November 28, a rapidly moving cold front brought winds nearing 90 mph — hurricane-force gusts that fanned the flames and drove the fire straight into Gatlinburg.

Allen Robbins, CEO of Sevier County Electric System, remembers the pressure of managing his first major storm as CEO. “We handled the outage the way we would any wind or snow event,” he said. “But this was my first storm as general manager, and I could feel the weight of it. The first reports coming in from our linemen were that the smoke was so heavy they could barely see, and they were asking for surgical masks just to breathe.”

As SCES lineworkers continued to work outages throughout their service area, the fires surrounding the city intensified. Robbins recounts how one lineman working to restore a three-phase circuit at the north end of the city described a rolling inferno moving into town from the mountains, casting off embers “the size of bricks.” As SCES foreman Tim Nichols and his crew made their way into downtown Gatlinburg still working to restore power, fire crews began warning them that the fire was out of control and headed straight toward them. At that point, Robbins said, “They went from being linemen to being rescue workers.”

Nichols and his crew began moving up into the mountains, navigating winding back roads like Wiley Oakley where cars had been abandoned and people were running downhill toward them through smoke, heat, and howling wind. Robbins described scenes of terrified residents and tourists fleeing the mountainside as flaming debris blew through the air.

Working side by side with firefighters, police officers, and water department employees, the SCES crews began loading evacuees into bucket trucks, pickup trucks and any vehicle that could carry them, and driving people down to Pigeon Forge, letting them off, turning their trucks around, and heading right back into the teeth of the fire to rescue more.

Their work didn’t stop there. At one point, a compromised utility pole collapsed across the only evacuation route out of Gatlinburg, trapping thousands unless the path could be cleared. With winds screaming at 80 to 90 miles per hour – conditions in which raising a bucket truck is nearly impossible – SCES linemen lifted the bucket anyway, cut the wires loose, and opened the road so evacuees could escape. “Our guys went up in it and cut those wires loose so everybody could get out,” Robbins said.

Desperate for any escape from the smoke-filled air, the line crews were turning on the air conditioners in their trucks and crawling onto the floorboards to breathe directly from the a/c vents. Yet, the crews continued making rescue runs, driven by thoughts of their own children and families and what they’d want done for them, until it became too dangerous to do so.

By that point, calls were coming in from state and local officials, alerting Robbins that they were desperate to get the electric to Gatlinburg’s main water intake facility back on. All water reserves were at the threshold of being exhausted and without power, firefighters would soon have no water pressure to fight the advancing flames. Worse still, the 69 kV line to the South Gatlinburg and Ski Mountain Substations were down and the fiber that controlled SCADA switching was destroyed, leaving SCES without any ability to transfer power remotely. Everything would have to be done manually … inside the fire zone.

“We were getting a lot of pressure,” Robbins said. “We had to get that Gatlinburg water plant back on.”

SCES dispatched a team of about ten employees who began working their way toward the facility, navigating a maze of blocked roads, fallen trees, and compromised terrain. What would normally have been a quick drive became a slow, hazardous crawl through smoke and heat.

To restore power, the crews had to complete a multi-step manual switching sequence to move the feed to the North Gatlinburg substation. It was a time-consuming, technical operation under the best of conditions, yet this team did it while sitting, as Robbins put it, “in the heart of the fire.” With limited cell service and flames closing in, Senior Engineer Brent Ogle walked the substation team through each step over the phone as they worked.

The contrast between those racing out and those heading in could not have been more striking. As the SCES convoy advanced toward the water intake-station, firefighters were retreating in the opposite direction. “The firemen were looking at our guys big-eyed, saying we were crazy going in where we went,” Robbins recalled. “But that’s the only way to get it done.”

For more than two hours, the SCES crews stayed in place, following the switching sequence piece by piece, until they were finally able to re-energize the water plant. With power restored, Gatlinburg’s firefighters had the water pressure they needed at the very moment the city depended on it most.

When the immediate danger finally passed and crews were able to regroup, the weight of what they had just lived through began to settle in. Many of the lineworkers later described feeling shaken, not by the work itself, but by the lives at stake and the helplessness of watching a community burn around them. Some wrestled with the trauma long after the flames were extinguished. Yet even in their exhaustion and grief, their commitment to their neighbors never faltered. As Robbins reflected, every decision made that night — from pulling people into bucket trucks to fighting their way into the fire to restore the water plant — came down to a simple truth: “They are brave unsung heroes, that continually do whatever it takes to serve our community.”

The stories of Troy Plemons, the Mountain Electric Cooperative crew, and the Sevier County Electric System lineworkers span different geographies and different disasters, but they reveal something deeply consistent about the people who work in public power. Whether they are rescuing a woman from a submerged SUV, lifting a stranded driver from a raging creek, or driving into a firestorm to restore water pressure for an entire city, these employees repeatedly choose courage over caution, service over safety, and community over self. Their heroism isn’t a role they train for; it’s a reflection of the values that define the public power model: neighbors serving neighbors, with a sense of duty that extends far beyond job descriptions. In moments when seconds matter and lives hang in the balance, public power employees reveal what reliability truly means. It’s not just restoring power after a storm, but being a steady presence when their communities need them most.

ACROSS THE COUNTRY, PUBLIC POWER EMPLOYEES ROUTINELY STEP INTO DANGER TO PROTECT THE PEOPLE THEY SERVE. HERE ARE THREE EXAMPLES OF COURAGE AND THE PUBLIC POWER SPIRIT OF HEROISM FROM BEYOND THE TENNESSEE VALLEY.

Arizona — A Troubleman Saves a Crash Victim

During a routine patrol for Salt River Project (SRP), Substation Troubleman John Boyle came upon a car that had crashed into an embankment. Boyle pulled over, assessed the situation, and helped rescue the injured driver. His actions are credited with saving the man’s life.

Oregon — A Meterman Performs Lifesaving CPR

Umatilla Electric Cooperative journeyman meterman Jake Royer noticed two people struggling in a parking lot before realizing one was attempting to administer CPR to the other. Drawing on his CPR training, Royer took over chest compressions and kept the person alive until EMS arrived.

Washington — Lineworkers Honored for Wildfire Rescue Work

Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) lineworkers Zachariah Butler and Travis Asling were awarded a Civilian Hero Award after helping evacuate residents and protect homes during a fast-moving brush fire. Their quick action safeguarded lives and critical infrastructure.

These stories, and many more like them, underscore a shared truth: whether in the Valley or across the country, public power employees consistently meet crisis with calm, courage, skill, and dedication to the communities they serve.