April 7, 2025
Enhancing Industry Leading Rope Inspection Best Practices with AI Technology
Enhancing Industry Leading Rope Inspection Best Practices with AI Technology
Ensuring safety is essential for our people and our utility customers. MYR Group’s transmission and distribution (T&D) operations teams are improving safety measures by implementing industry-leading rope inspection processes and adopting AI technology to further strengthen these efforts.
Why rope inspection matters
Rope is an integral tool in electrical transmission and distribution work, used in wire pulls and transmission haul backs on projects of all sizes and voltages.
If rope breaks on the job during a pull, the resulting dropped line can cause anything from minor injury, property damage and unplanned outages, to severe injuries and death. Efforts to prevent rope failures are critical to keeping both our lineworkers and the public safe.
Developing best practices for rope inspection
Years ago, MYR Group set out to prevent these kinds of potential rope failures from happening by developing and implementing a rope inspection process for our transmission and distribution operations. This process, which began in 2016, has evolved to establish industry-leading best practices for rope inspection. Most recently, we have enhanced these practices by incorporating AI technology to improve the visual inspection process, ensuring even greater reliability and safety.
cJosh Holland is integral to MYR Group’s Fleet department. He oversees the critical aspect of fleet and asset management for all rope used in wire stringing across MYR Group’s companies. Together, the rope inspection team inspected more than 5 million feet of rope in 2024 and expect to continue at that pace annually.
“I want every wire pull to be a safe pull. Some of my best friends are lineworkers and whatever we can do to help protect them in the field is our main goal,” says Holland.
The team visually inspects all rope once a year, ensuring that no rope remains in the field for more than a year without being inspected.
It is also inspected every time it changes locations within MYR Group. For example, if a rope is being used by Sturgeon Electric in Colorado and going to be sent to Harlan Electric for a project in the Northeast, it goes to the rope inspection team in Indiana for inspection in between.
These best practices are applied to all rope the company owns and anything that comes with rental equipment before it is ever sent out to a job site.
While the industry standard is 3-to-1 strength for a safe workload, MYR Group’s rope inspection technicians use a higher 3.5-to-1 ratio. This means rope on a 4,000 lb. puller would need to meet the threshold of 14,000 lb. break strength for MYR Group to approve use of the rope.
Embracing technology to strengthen our rope inspection processes
Implementing regular inspections of all rope was already making work safer and reducing rope failures when Holland learned about a new high-tech product to improve rope inspection. A company called Scope developed an AI system to detect damage and measure the quality of a used rope compared to a new rope.
This innovative technology is a device with multiple cameras that rope can be pulled through as the cameras image the rope. It uses AI technology to analyze the condition of the rope, as compared to brand new rope, and produces a “percentage of new” rating, as well as noting the locations of splices, debris, damage and anomalies at points along the rope.
Holland and the entire rope inspection team was influential and “played a crucial role” by collaborating with Scope to pressure-test and validate the technology’s damage detection capabilities, helping it “achieve a high level of accuracy.”
“As one of the first adopters, MYR Group helped pressure-test the system extensively before its public release. By utilizing the Scope system to predict the break strength of line segments, then testing those predictions against actual break strength measurements, MYR Group provided valuable feedback that enabled continuous improvement. Their hands-on involvement allowed Scope’s AI models to be iteratively fine-tuned, ultimately achieving reliable accuracy, ensuring the system was highly effective for real-world use,” Scope wrote on its website.
Following the pressure testing phase, the team implemented the technology in 2024 to successfully augment their visual inspections.
If the SCOPE machine identifies rope conditions that are 65 percent of a new rope’s spliced break strength (or lower), that portion of rope is retired. If the majority of the reel has rope that tests below this threshold, the entire reel is replaced and any rope from it that tests above the threshold is saved for future usage.
The use of Scope’s AI-driven technology has bolstered their processes by providing “an extra set of eyes on the rope,” and providing documentation of the quality of each rope that is second to none.
It also provides time savings in situations where visual inspections discover a section of rope that looks worn or prompts concern. That rope can be fed through the SCOPE machine and more quickly identify the point where the rope quality meets our strength standards again. Then technicians can cut a sample of the section and break test the strength to confirm the results.
“Implementing AI technology for rope inspection has been a game-changer for us. Not only have we significantly reduced rope failures and improved safety, but we’ve also set a new standard for efficiency and best practices in our industry.”
MYR Group Director of Specialty Equipment Josh Holland
