Eastern Kentucky power worker falls 27 feet, breaks both his arms after pole snaps
A lineman working for an Eastern Kentucky power company fell 27 feet and broke both of his arms, as well as a shoulder, while climbing a pole in the company’s effort to restore power after mass outages over the past couple of weeks.
Scott Spencer, a lineman with the Licking Valley Rural Electric Cooperative in West Liberty, fell Tuesday when a pole he was climbing snapped near the ground, according to the cooperative.
In addition to a broken shoulder and arms, Spencer suffered additional scrapes and bruises, the cooperative said. He had surgery on his broken shoulder, but the damage was significant enough that it couldn’t be repaired.
Spencer’s wife, April Sallie-Spencer, wrote in a post that Spencer will need metal plates and screws or a plastic ball joint inserted to further repair the shoulder. She said he’d have another surgery “in a day or two.”
In his Facebook posts, Spencer thanked people for an outpouring of support, including an “unreal” amount of texts and calls.
It’s “not fun typing with both arms broke,” he wrote.
“We anticipate him being in the hospital for several days and will be facing a long recovery,” the cooperative said in a Facebook post Wednesday. “He’s a strong young man, and we know he will get through this.”
Spencer was flown by Breathitt-Wolfe County Emergency Medical Services to University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital after the accident, the cooperative said.
Licking Valley Rural Electric Cooperative, which provides power to customers in Breathitt, Elliott, Estill, Johnson, Lee, Magoffin, Menifee, Morgan, Powell, Rowan and Wolfe counties, said it still had 46 reported power outages as of Thursday. The company hoped to get power restored to everyone by Friday.
There were 4,586 outages reported in Kentucky Thursday night, according to PowerOutage.us. The remaining outages were primarily in Eastern Kentucky, a region hit particularly hard with downed trees, hazardous roads and massive power outages during a series of winter storms that began two weeks ago.
More than 97 percent of customers in some Eastern Kentucky counties were without power during the worst outages.
The number of outages was greater than 150,000 at one point during three waves of winter storms that blasted Kentucky, causing unsafe road conditions and resulting in numerous deaths – some from hazardous roads and others from hypothermia.
This story was originally published February 25, 2021 at 12:58 PM.