While power poles may seem like a convenient place to advertise for a garage sale or business, they’re last place you should be tacking a sign. Not only does placing a sign on our poles put you dangerously close to energized power lines, it’s also a safety hazard for our employees.

Lately we’ve seen a growing number of signs attached to our poles. In fact, our crews recently had a contest to see who could remove the most. In total, 599 signs were removed, with the winning crew removing around 300 of those. (They were rewarded with an extra day off.)

We invested a lot of time removing these signs over the course of a few weeks, but the effort was well worth it. Getting rid of these signs will help keep our crews safe and get your power on more quickly in the event of an outage.

That’s because your co-op line crews have to climb those poles, often in the middle of the night or during bad weather. Any sort of obstruction on the pole becomes a safety hazard for them.

Not only do these signs impede their ability to get to work, they can damage their equipment. Sharp objects, such as nails, staples or barbed wire, can puncture our linemen’s rubber gloves and safety equipment. When these become damaged, it strips away their critical protection from high-voltage electricity.

Because we work in a dangerous industry, we take safety very seriously. We want each and every one of our employees to make it home safely each night. We have a pretty good track record so far—we recently celebrated 8 years without a lost-time accident. But we need your help to keep it that way.

If you spot something on a utility pole that doesn’t belong to the co-op, please remove it. Or let us know so we can remove it. We need to keep our poles free of obstructions, so fixtures not belonging to the cooperative or another utility will be removed by SPEC line personnel. The co-op is not responsible for any losses if an item is damaged or destroyed during removal.