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THE DAVEY BULLETIN
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January/February 2021
UTILITY CREWS SPEND MONTHS ON HURRICANE RECOVERY EFFORTS
Each hurricane season, hundreds of Davey employees
spend thousands of hours on the road helping utility clients
and communities recover from the devastation wrought by
severe storms.
The 2020 hurricane season brought a historic number of
storms through the summer and fall, which saw many Davey
employees spending weeks at a time on the road supporting
hurricane response work. A total of 12 named storms made
landfall in the U.S. out of the 30 named storms – a record
for total named storms in a single hurricane season.
MISSION
The season ended in November with Davey employees yet
again traveling throughout the Gulf Coast region following
the landfall of Hurricane Zeta, which struck Louisiana
Oct. 28 as a Category 2 storm, and Hurricane Eta, which
made landfall north of Tampa on Nov. 10 as a tropical storm.
A total 117 employees responded to aid recovery from
Hurricane Zeta in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
Another 50 employees traveled to Florida for Hurricane Eta.
Keith Horn, area manager, Eastern Utility services, said
60 Davey employees responded to both storms from the
Orlando Utilities Commission, City of Ocala, Central Florida
Electric Cooperative, Florida Public Utilities, and Orange
County accounts.
Horn said the Davey crews returned home from the first
storm, Zeta, on a Friday and were back on the road on
Saturday responding to Eta. Both storm responses for his
crews lasted about three weeks.
"It used to be that a storm response might last a week
or 10 days, but this year, just about every time we
went out we were working two to three weeks,"
Horn said. "One response, we were over
four weeks. This is the first season to my
knowledge that we've spent that much
time out working storms.
"It's been an incredible effort by the crews,"
he said. "They really stepped up. Having worked
storms before, I know how exhausting it is mentally
as well as physically, and those crews have really stepped
up and put forth a great effort for the company, our utility
clients and their communities."
Curtis Morgan, production manager, Eastern Utility services,
coordinated responses from numerous crews who took part
in every Davey response during the 2020 storm season,
including one group of employees who spent almost seven
weeks on a single response.
"After some of these crews were on the road for such a
long period of time we then had Zeta brewing," Morgan
said. "Sending them back out and not knowing how long
they would be gone again, getting them to rally back out
there was not too big of a task for me but I'm sure it was
a big task for them. They were still willing even though they
didn't know how long it would be, and they had already
spent so much time on the road."
Morgan took crews to assist Florida Power and Light in its
recovery from Zeta.
