Electrician Shares the Hard Work Behind the Scenes of Keeping Liberty’s Lights On
For years, thousands of students have flooded out of the Vines Center after Convocation, stepping over an unassuming gray metal grate in the sidewalk.
The light peeking through that grate illuminates a cement room. Although small, the room is vital – holding the green transformer box that once powered the Vines Center, which is now silent and superfluous due to renovations.
On a Tuesday morning in October, Gregory Harvey stood next to the box, anticipating the crane he would have to bring in to haul it out. The embroidery on Harvey’s fluorescent orange sweatshirt announced his department: Planning & Construction.
Appalachian Power brings electricity to campus, and Planning & Construction teams take it from there, installing and maintaining campus electrical infrastructure. Harvey’s team focuses on installation.
Liberty’s explosive growth keeps Harvey busy — he has moved the Vines transformer box twice already. Harvey put up the lights on the field beside Commons 3 and expects to take them down again, as the university plans to replaces the field with a dining hall in the future.
A typical day for Harvey and his team begins around 6 a.m. and ends at about 4:30 p.m. What happens in between varies – Harvey might drive across campus to give a key from his ring to a worker locked out of a building or help install electric car charging ports in the East Campus parking garage. It all depends on the day. Once he was summoned to fix a faulty cooler in the cadaver lab at the then-new medical school.
Currently, his team is working in Vines on lifts which raise them above the clouds of drywall dust and tumbleweeds of used painters’ tape to the ceiling, where they are installing the lighting system.
On breaks, they relax in their shop just off Candler’s Mountain Road, near Hardee’s. A sign on the break room door declares “Motorcycle Parking Only” and a NASCAR sticker decorates the microwave.
Inside, Harvey’s team of six electricians tells stories of their work at Liberty.
Like Harvey, many first worked on campus as contractors with other companies before becoming full time. They have helped to transform the university, putting up lights in the football stadium, installing a Coke Zero machine in coach Hugh Freeze’s office and hauling miles of cable — with the help of a knee-high pulley on a machine called a tugger — to ring buildings with power lines and backup circuits.
One worker, Kyle Monfils, recalled stringing wires onto tracks across the roof of Green Hall in January and February 2017. Working in freezing temperatures with hardware too delicate for gloved hands, Monfils and his co-workers alternated between warming their hands in gloves and pulling them off to work. One summer Monfils listened through ten audiobooks while installing handrail lights along stairs and pedestrian bridges around campus.
The team sometimes works nights, weekends and holidays to avoid inconveniencing students.
“Everything’s based around ya’ll,” Harvey said referring to students. “Ya’ll pay the bills.”
The workers had one request for students: please do not dash in front of our trucks. They told the story of Danny Robinson, who manages electrical maintenance, stopping and looking both ways at a crosswalk only to have a cyclist hit the truck he was driving. Robinson retrieved the bike from under his tire, gave the student a ride and got the bike tire mended before returning it.
Students bring extra stress to electrical workers by ignoring caution tape and traffic rules, but they also occasionally bring hot chocolate and doughnuts or an extra helping hand. Two of the workers recalled a student who, after bringing them much-appreciated water for a servant evangelism assignment, tried to help them haul cables.
The electricians said they would not mind if students they hear speculating about construction projects would stop to ask what they are working on.
Walking over the grass roof the covers the back end of Vines toward the electric yard behind the Jerry Falwell Library, Harvey explained the paths of conduit, five-foot pipes, and electrical wires that crisscross and circle campus below ground. Students walk above his team’s work every day, Harvey said. Most never know it’s there.
Sometimes the most important things in life are understated – most do not think about electrical wires until power goes out across campus. When convocation starts up again in the Vines Center, take notice of the grey metal plate – an unnoticed campus feature that is shockingly vital to life at LU as we know it.
Esther Eaton is a Feature Reporter. Follow her on Twitter at @EstherJay10.