Career Concludes After 40 Years
For Immediate Release
Contact: Renee Whitener, Director of Corporate Communications, Blue Ridge Electric Membership Corporation, (828) 758-2383 ext. 3213; Pager:1-800-471-1323; or E-mail: Renee Whitener
Lenoir, North Carolina (March 26, 2004) – Forty years ago, Bruce Drum received a post card from a lady letting him know her power was out and that Blue Ridge Electric Membership Corporation could stop by and fix it whenever the linemen were out that way.
Times have changed. Continuous, around-the-clock power is expected by households, businesses and the utilities themselves. Waiting to have power until a lineman is in the neighborhood is not an option—electricity is too critical in our every day lives.
Bruce Drum, who has seen many changes over his 40-year career with Blue Ridge Electric, also isn’t waiting any longer for something very important to him. “It’s time to retire to my second job,” he said, explaining that would consist of a lot of fishing, some travel, volunteering in his community, and certainly spending more time with his family, especially his grandchildren.
“Retiring is like starting a new job,” Drum said with a reminiscent look in his eye. “I’ll have to adjust. My co-workers and many of the members we serve are like family to me. I’ll miss them. But I’ve looked forward to this for a long time.”
Drum, who served many years as a linemen and is retiring as director of electric plant development, said he has appreciated the linemen most of all throughout his career. “The efforts they make, the long hours they keep, sometimes out in the snow and ice and high winds, and the time they have to spend away from their families—it’s all a way of life,” Drum said. “It takes a special person to be a lineman. You have to want to get your fulfillment from making other people’s lives better. The most important part of their job comes when there’s an outage. Their biggest concern is how to get the power back on quickly for our members,” he explained.
Drum said he’s been fortunate to have worked in various areas of Blue Ridge Electric, a member-owned cooperative serving some 66,000 members in Caldwell, Watauga, Ashe, Alleghany, Wilkes and Alexander counties. As a young man just starting his family, Drum joined the electric cooperative as a construction layout technician who plotted out the paths of new electric service to homes and businesses. Since then, he’s also served as a lineman, construction manager, district operations manager supervising the linemen and operations in Caldwell District, director of operations over all the cooperative’s districts, and most recently as director of electric plant development where he oversaw much of Blue Ridge Electric’s construction projects to ensure a high level of power reliability.
Drum has been directly involved in some of the utility’s most difficult, demanding work. “Hurricane Hugo was our most severe storm in my time here,” Drum said. “That storm put people out of power for up to a month on our system and across the state, and every member in Caldwell County was without power. Every employee had a job in getting the power back on, and we had 500 linemen helping at one time. No one went home—we had 24-hour shifts and we worked 18-hour days and slept for six hours,” he explained. “After a month of restoring power, we were still working four weeks later cleaning up the debris.”
Drum says serving members with reliable power and going the extra mile to do the little, courteous things is what an electric cooperative like Blue Ridge Electric is all about. “The cooperative way is the best way of business devised. In a cooperative, our customers are the owners and therefore we’ve always worked harder to meet their needs. The employees who work here understand that and are proud to have the opportunity to work for a cooperative. They give their heart and soul, and there is so much they do to give back to our communities.”
Cooperatives were formed in the 1930s by local residents wanting to establish electricity in areas where larger utilities weren’t interested in serving. That commitment to local communities hasn’t changed over the years. Drum is proud of that fact, but is glad to say that evolving technology has changed the way Blue Ridge Electric gets the work done. “The biggest change is in the equipment the linemen use,” he said. “Forty years ago, utilities set poles by digging holes and securing them by hand. There’s also much better safety equipment now for protecting our linemen in what can be a very dangerous job.”
“In 1970, we got our first bucket truck,” Drum continued. “The bucket truck has made our work faster and somewhat easier physically. It’s also allowed us to work on power lines while they’re “hot” (energized). That means we don’t have to turn off people’s power to repair or perform maintenance on the power lines.”
Drum is passionate about serving the members by keeping the power on. He’s instilled that passion in many new employees and those he’s supervised over the years. His co-workers say he is able recognize other’s strengths and motivate them to produce high levels of performance and productivity. Drum says he enjoys helping others and seeing them progress and he never hesitates to assist a co-worker or others around him.
Of course, that’s what’s special about being involved with a cooperative. “Co-op people are good people wherever you go,” Drum said. “You can almost recognize co-op people wherever you are.”
