A Glen Campbell song starts out "I am a lineman from the country... The lineman drives the main road, seaching in the sun, for another overload..."

KPUD's White Salmon office linemen are more likely to be searching in a downpour for power interruptions due to overloads. But when the lights go out, they are the guys who find and fix the problem.

"It's a long process," says Mick Lutz, White Salmon line crew foreman. "There are trees, bad weather and snow to contend with, just to get the power back on."

Mike and his crew - Journeymen Ed Lexa, Bernie Predeek, and Rob Marlow - work the country area west of Horsethief Lake, while the east county is handled by the Goldendale crew.

"But if there's a big construction job or a major outage problem, we all pitch in together to get the work done," Mike says.

The second week of July, 2004 found the crew in Murdock installing underground cable for a new home.

Underground electrical cable is now used almost exclusively in new building installations, Mike says.

The primary underground distribution cable is about one-inch thick. In the center is an aluminum conductor - the hot wires - wrapped in a conductor shield. This is surrounded by insulation and an insulation shield. On the outside are solid bare copper wires uniformly spaced around the cable as a concentric circle and enclosed by a jacket. The cable is encased in a flexible conduit, which the crew can pull right off the reel. That eliminates having to clue PVC conduit together, then pulling the cable into and through the conduit.

Crew members take turns on standby, ready to respond to emergency calls, and they can be depended on to respond to the calls and locate and fix the power outage. They can also be depended on to maintain the equipment and install new services.

The crew's priority is keeping the lights on in west Klickitat County.