Platte-Clay Electric Cooperative’s Jeff McCullough will always remember the feeling when he heard the co-op’s dispatcher issue a mayday call earlier this spring.

A PCEC lineworker had suffered a contact while cleaning debris from a downed tree off a 7,200-volt line, he said. He was slumped over the bucket, unresponsive.

“The hair stood up on the back of my neck,” says McCullough, safety director at the Kearney, Missouri, co-op. “It gave me chills. I hope to never hear it again.”

Fortunately, the incident was not real, the stricken colleague was actually a training dummy, and the dispatch call was part of a large-scale safety drill at a field near PCEC’s headquarters.

It was the co-op’s first mayday drill and involved local first responders in two counties and the LifeFlight Eagle team serving western and central Missouri. Crews from several Missouri co-ops watched and took notes as PCEC lineworkers put out the mayday call to dispatch, lowered the training dummy from the bucket to the ground and performed CPR and used the AED.

“We’ve done fire and tornado drills, but we’ve never done one to see how we’d react when one of our own gets hurt,” McCullough says. “We also wanted experience working with our local fire department and other agencies and to learn from one another to improve processes.”

The hourlong drill followed a scheduled pole-top training exercise. As drill coordinator, McCullough worked with rescue agencies on a script with timelines and a sequence of events. He also met with all players ahead of time to review the day’s agenda and answer last-minute questions. After observing the drill, he facilitated a debriefing session among the lineworkers and first responders.

Four co-op line crewmembers volunteered as drill actors, including apprentice Conner Young who, as the victim, got to ride in the LifeFlight helicopter to a local burn unit while strapped on a gurney. Also participating were Line Apprentice Heath Maley, Journeyman Lineman Joseph Roach and Aaron Wood, foreman.

“It was definitely an eye-opener for me to see how many people are put in motion just to save a single life, and, overall, it was a very good process to a part of,” Young says. He recalls the helicopter’s cramped interior came as a surprise. “In the air, they look pretty big, but inside there isn’t as much room as you’d think.”

The drill raised awareness of procedures and protocols of all participants and magnified the importance of crystal-clear communication when multiple parties—in this case, 911, fire and rescue, co-op crews and LifeFlight—are working in a high-stress situation.

“It’s important to make sure people know the information to report,” says Annie Poelzl, emergency management director for Clay County. She says that until then she didn’t realize a lineworker would make the initial mayday call to the co-op dispatcher instead of a 911 operator.

The co-op also learned valuable lessons during the drill.

“There’s a set of information that dispatch needs when it calls 911, and a lot of that information wasn’t transferred at the time or shared between the two parties,” McCullough says.

In addition, co-op line crews requested annual CPR recertification instead of every other year.

“One of the ways we’re going to get there is for myself and hopefully a few others to become certified trainers,” McCullough said. “It was an eye-opening experience that will always stick with us.”