THE NIGHT SHIFT

While city sleeps Keys Energy workers

keep the juice on around the Lower Keys

BY TERRY SCHMIDA

The lights have been clicking off around Key West and the Lower Keys for hours now, but in a small room on Stock Island, two Keys Energy Services employees are burning the midnight oil.

They’ve got the power.

These workers perform a job few people think about – until a storm, an errant iguana, or some other calamity cuts off somebody’s air-conditioning, hot water, or ice-making abilities.

At that point, members of a panicky public place their calls to Keys Energy and wind up talking to the cheery voices inside the utility’s temporary electro-bunker.

“Our main focus here is maintaining balance and reliability in the system,” said Power System Coordinator/Dispatcher Jennifer Bevis. “But we also call trucks to fix outage problems as far north as three poles into the City of Marathon. Sometimes these are extremely localized problems, like a transformer blowing. We also keep a close eye on the weather, and how it could affect the system.”

Bevis, from South Bend, Ind., is a seven-year employee of Keys Energy. Her colleague Eric Balbuena, a Conch, has logged 14 years with the company.

Both began their careers in other departments, transferring into their current capacity while completing a two-year apprentice program that fully grounds them in the science of electricity management.

Proficiency with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) testing scheme is also encouraged, but not required.

Two employees at a time work 12-hour shifts, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., or from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. They do this for two days and two nights, and then take four days off.

“It’s a fireman’s schedule,” Bevis said.

While most of the action happens during the day, there are “still outages that happen at night,” Balbuena said. “If it’s a transformer coming offline, we have crews on standby here for emergency purposes.”

Another aspect of the job is coordinating foliage trimming around power lines.

“We’re really active with this in the summer,” Balbuena added. “That’s our busy time.”

One thing the workers definitely don’t do is deal with billing situations, or set up times for power hookups for new customers.

“That’s outside our field,” Bevis said. “But we still get queries about those things.”

Before too long, the sun will set on the Stock Island nerve center: The main control room, located at the Keys Energy headquarters on James Street, will be brought back online, as renovations to the building are completed.

“We’ll still have this room as a back-up,” Balbuena said. “Which is good. Having a back-up stations is the industry standard.”

Wherever they work, however, they’ll find it difficult to keep their minds off the grid they work on, even as they walk by substations on their days off.

“Everybody in the company thinks like that,” Bevis said. “You get used to it.”