The last time Penny LaMar saw Midland Power Cooperative’s Justin Schmidt and Gerod Schafer, she was stranded in a puddle of mud outside her Boone County, Iowa, home. She had slipped, fracturing her leg, and was unable to get up.
When they met again about two months later, the circumstances were far happier. At an Aug. 19 ceremony at the co-op’s Boone headquarters, LaMar, 76, thanked the line foreman and journeyman lineman for rescuing her and calling 911.
“In my heart, I wanted something done for these gentlemen, because most of the time you guys just catch hell when the power’s out. There’s no ‘attaboys’ time,” Lamar said. “So just thank you, thank you!”
In early June, Schmidt and Schafer were responding to an outage near LaMar’s home in a remote area framed by a cornfield and a stretch of trees. As they were driving down a long dirt road near her house, they saw LaMar in her driveway, waving.
“We thought she had an outage, too, and was waving us down,” Schmidt said. “But when we pulled in, she was lying down in the driveway. Her dogs were around her, so we thought she was petting them. That’s when we got out of our vehicle and asked what was going on.”
Lamar told the linemen she had fallen and was in a lot of pain. “I spent 30 years as a physician assistant, so I knew I was in trouble,” she said at the August ceremony.
After the crew called 911, they waited with LaMar until emergency responders arrived about 30-45 minutes later. LaMar remained alert and calm while Schmidt and Schafer took turns chatting with her. One of them took the dogs back inside and retrieved her glasses, cellphone and wallet to take to the hospital.
“She told us her husband was in Canada on a fishing trip and asked us to take pictures with her phone and send them to him,” Schmidt said.
In addition to LaMar’s leg fracture, her blood sugar fell to critically low levels, and internal bleeding left her anemic. If LaMar hadn’t flagged down the co-op crew, she likely would have gone undetected, both men said, noting that her home was about 200 feet off the road.
Regular on-the-job training also helped the crew keep a clear head during the incident, they said.
“All of our training—first aid, hazard recognition training, and keeping people comfortable—we’ve had over the years has just kind of kicked in,” Schafer said.
That training, along with the crews’ instinct to look out for others, “says a lot about the culture we’ve built here,” Midland Power CEO Bill McKim said.
“When they recognized that Penny was in trouble, they came to her aid,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about how we do our jobs. It’s about looking out for others and taking action when someone needs help.”
Victoria A. Rocha is a staff writer for NRECA.