^{March 28, 2025} MYR Group’s Live Line Academy Successfully Graduates Pilot Class

Program offers MYR Group subsidiaries a robust facility to develop Barehand energized capabilities

Mike Collins distinctly remembers those meetings in the early days.

Harlan Electric Company (Harland Electric) launched its live-line barehand training program from scratch in 2019, and it’s fair to say the initial training space in Methuen, Mass., was far from spectacular. The office was cramped, and there was certainly no immediate access to training structures.

“If people could see the meetings that we had when we first started in this tiny office with a handful of people,” says Collins, Harlan Electric’s superintendent, who was instrumental in building its energized program, “compared to where we are now – they’d be astonished.”

Where they are now is the Live Line Academy training facility located in Alvarado, Texas, roughly 40 minutes south of Fort Worth.

The Live Line Academy facility is the culmination of years of planning and coordination between Harlan Electric and Great Southwestern Construction (Great Southwestern), two MYR Group subsidiaries that perform energized line work for customers in the Northeast and West Texas.

Each company independently started its own live-line barehand training program in 2019, but worked together over the past few years to design and build a first-class training facility and program to certify lineworkers from any MYR Group subsidiary seeking to perform energized construction for its customers.

In January 2025, the Live Line Academy officially graduated its pilot class, which included eight lineworkers from Harlan Electric and Great Southwestern, each completing the 10-day program and achieving the 90-percent pass rate on the 50-question written exam.

“We saw the students really invest and engage with the technical material, with the weights and forces and calculations,” Live Line Academy Director of Training Billy Walsh said. “Not everyone grasps that material. And that’s a credit to our amazing trainers. They made sure everyone was comfortable and understood the concepts.”

Collins and fellow Harlan Electric superintendent Justin Evans served as trainers for the Academy’s pilot class, two lineworkers with years of experience performing energized work in their careers. Students learn the planning, organization, execution strategies, written procedures, and task hazard analysis needed to perform barehand work.

The program combines classroom learning with practical training in the yard, which is only a few hundred feet away. The Live Line Academy is a challenging certification process, and lineworkers who attend must understand complex electrical theory, perform formulas, and demonstrate a strong understanding of the work to graduate.

“We didn’t make the Live Line Academy program easy,” Great Southwestern Regional Manager Ryan Little said. “There are no softballs here. The material is challenging, the structures are going to be difficult to work, and it’s going to be real-life scenarios.”

The facility itself is an extension of the Great Southwestern apprenticeship training yard. Leaders from Great Southwestern and Harlan Electric partnered to design the expanded facility, combining their experience to ensure every relevant scenario could be taught and trained.

The yard includes a 345kV lattice tower, steel and wooden monopoles, H-frame structures, and dead-end as well as 138kV wooden structures with energized distribution underbuild. Two Timpson units enable the facility to train on energized lines with controlled voltages, simulating real-world scenarios without the danger of electrical shock.

“I’ve been to a lot of training facilities throughout Canada and the U.S. In terms of a facility that meets every requirement that you’re ever going to need, and then how it’s all constructed and put together and the technology behind that,” Walsh said, “I don’t know that there’s any facility as unique as what we have.”

Operational leaders from around MYR Group were invited to tour the facility and see the Live Line Academy pilot class in action, coming away impressed with the level of detail and quality given to every aspect.

While currently only Harlan Electric and Great Southwestern offer energized construction, the Live Line Academy facility enables other MYR Group companies to develop the capability without the restrictions the other two faced while building out their programs.

“For our subsidiaries that don’t have energized experience, but are looking to get this type of work, this is the perfect, controlled environment to bring your crews down and start training,” Little said. “They’ll gain real-life experience, with all the safety measures in place to protect them, to teach them what they need to go out and perform this type of work for their customers.”

Not all regions of the country perform energized work today, but as load demand and complications from outages continue to increase, more utilities across the country may turn to energized solutions. Electrical contractors who can offer their customers uninterrupted service through safe live line work become an appealing partner.

“You have to take the first step,” said Eric Lauriha, Sturgeon Electric’s president of Transmission and Distribution. “Even though barehand work is a small percentage of the work we do daily across the industry, I think eventually it will become more prevalent.

“If we want to have a full box of tools, we have to get on board and we have to be ready for the opportunities when they come.”