Featured Jobs
Saturday 1st October 2008
Published: The Weekend Australian
Writer: Chris Herde
Where: Active Tree Services, Western Australia
Salary: $100,000 plus overtime and allowances
Closing date: Continued demand
Inquiries: Mariel Castro (07) 3168 0090
www.bluecollar.com.au
IT'S not a job for the faint-hearted, and takes a special kind of person. Someone who wants to spend a good part of their day up to 20m in the air removing tree branches a hair's breadth from high-voltage power lines. Certified live linesmen, or women, experienced in vegetation maintenance are a very rare breed.
Active Tree Services state manager for South Australia and Tasmania Jim Roberts, who has 10 years' experience in power line vegetation management, says it's a "specialised" field. "They're very hard to find.
They're live linesmen firstly, and the treeclearing side of it has come second," he says. "Most live linesmen work for power companies replacing the wires or transformers, fuses or working on the actual infrastructure.
So the difficulty is finding someone who is a live linesman but who also has skills cutting back trees."
Demand has soared over the last few years. This has stemmed from a documented failure by some power authorities to keep up with vegetation maintenance around distribution power lines, but also from changes in consumer expectations.
Increasingly environmentally aware, the public no longer tolerates wide asements around distribution power lines, and with the surge in reliance on computers and electronics, consumers have lost any tolerance for blackouts either from errant trees or power disruption for maintenance.
And with bushfire season approaching, authorities are also very mindful that the combination of vegetation and power lines could spark an inferno. Being in such demand, live linesman involved in vegetation management can expect to earn well over $100,000 a year.
But they have to get used to possibility of living away from home, and on a damp day hearing the unnerving low hum of up to 33kV of electricity only a slip away.
"It's considered a dangerous job when you are talking to anyone who has not been involved in it, but there is all the training everyone goes through, the safety procedures and precautions that are in place," Roberts says. "It's obviously on the higher end of the risk level, but that's what live linesmen do."
Active Tree Services, established in 1974, is a growing company with 500 employees around Australia. It conducts its vegetation maintenance program systematically. However, if some trees are judged too close to the main power lines then the live linesmen are brought in.
Active Tree Services currently employs only 10 specialist live linesmen Australia-wide, who do contract work for the major power utilities such as Western Power, Ergon Energy, Energy
Australia and others.
The company wants for six live linesmen for its West Australian operations. Recruitment specialist Mariel Castro of bluecollar.com.au says while Active Tree Services has been successful in finding live linesmen in Sydney, it has been a different story in WA.
"The client has advertised that job twice, once in Sydney and once in WA and in Sydney they got a substantial number of applications.
But in WA it's been very hard to get any at all," she says.
"In WA unemployment is low and there is
so much competition from the mining industry for linesmen. Active Tree Services is offering among the highest rates of pay for this line of work in the country."
Active Tree Services national human resources management Martin Purcell says
certified live linesman experienced in vegetation management is "quite an unusual occupation". "Linesmen are people who are in short supply anyway in Australia, and probably around the world, so we have to find people who have those qualifications but would like to branch into another field which is the vegetation side," Purcell says.
"The skill is in such short supply that we would probably make room for as many as we can get. As well as WA we also need them in Queensland, NSW and probably South Australia too. There is a very strict safety regime and it's highly regulated and controlled.
That's why the power authorities don't want us to have just ordinary tree trimmers up-close to the high voltage lines."
While Active Tree Services has considered recruiting overseas linesmen, the company prefers to recruit locally and is prepared to pay accommodation and travel allowances to attract the right workers.
To broaden its recruitment base, Active
Tree Services will also train any qualified live linesmen to the relevant standards in arboriculture, chainsaw competency and other skills needed for the job.
Purcell says Active Tree Services is "fanatical" about safety standards
"There is a very strict safety regime and it's highly regulated and controlled. That's why the power authorities don't want us to have just ordinary tree trimmers up close to the
high voltage lines. The high voltage lines can obviously do most of the damage," he says.
"These guys have to get close without
having to switch off the power. It's a big deal to have an outage to trim trees. So you have to be level-headed with a steady hand, someone who doesn't cut corners, who will follow procedure, so that they or anyone else are never put unduly at risk."