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7 January/February 2024 | THE DAVEY BULLETIN MISSION THOUSANDS OF POLES CLEANED UP BY DRG, EASTERN UTILITY Clarke Woods, account manager, Utility Asset Management services (UAM), Davey Resource Group (DRG), leads Davey teams who have been working with client AT&T to remove inactive wire infrastructure from their utility poles. "The telecommunications industry is transitioning primarily to fiber and there's a lot of old copper infrastructure cluttering up the poles that is no longer in use and needs to come down. The other aspect of it is, telecommunications companies are still having to pay either a maintenance or rental fee to be on the utility poles. Removal of the unused wires results in cost savings as well," Woods said. The removals kicked off with a pilot project in Stigler, Oklahoma, in 2021. Due to the success of the pilot, DRG UAM's fiber construction team including Woods, along with Jeff Carr, utility systems lead specialist; Mister Cobble, utility systems lead specialist; and William Dipre, project manager, led a group of 17 DRG UAM employees who removed inactive wires from 26,000 poles and performed joint use audits on 30,000 poles in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin in 2022. "2023 brought significant developments," Woods said. "The quality of our fiber construction team's work, data structure and delivery methodology, along with our ability to meet the volume of work resulted in Davey being designated as an AT&T vendor of choice. Carla Waldron, GIS production manager, DRG, was subsequently invited onto the AT&T National Schema and Change Management Review Board for Geographic Information Systems. For 2023, we removed inactive wires from roughly 54,000 poles and inventoried more than 1.2 million poles with joint use audits in Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin." The DRG UAM fiber construction team working on inactive removals for this project grew to 31 employees in 2023, led by (Donald) Troy Little, project manager. Little's field supervisors include Carr; Cobble; Kenny Mayfield, utility systems lead specialist; and Joe Musso, utility systems lead specialist. DRG UAM's field services and make ready engineering teams joined the project in 2023. The field services teams are led by John Bates, account manager; Joe Hawbaker, area manager; (Melvin) Johnny Henson, project manager; Roland Pratt, account manager; and Colton Westover, project manager. The make ready engineering team is led by Bill Croasmun, area manager. An average of 85 employees from the combined teams are working on this project. The rapid growth of the volume of work resulted in Woods bringing in Mark Mittiga, area manager, Eastern Utility services, to assist. Dan Kirchner, project manager, Eastern Utility; along with U.S. Rail equipment operators Christopher Benson and George Jones, removed more than 750 inactive wires from poles in Ohio during the second half of 2023. "DRG does a great job of getting Davey's name involved in several types of interesting projects. Being able to provide the crews and assist to meet their customer's production goals has been a unique experience for our employees who are used to primarily working on trees. I'm glad we've been able to help," Mittiga said. The project is expected to expand to a total of 15 states nationwide in 2024. "We've had a number of people who have really started to grow their careers through this project. Watching them evolve and grow with us is exciting. The collaboration with the other groups within Davey is a win-win because we needed more people and other teams had available employees. It was a great fit to work together and share the workload," Woods said. Adam Trubee, operator-telecommunications, Utility Asset Management services, Davey Resource Group, removes hardware from a utility pole.

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