A broken tree limb lies blocking a road after an ice storm in Barrie, Ont. on March 30, 2025. As severe weather events become more frequent, powerline technicians are spending longer hours in dangerous conditions restoring electricity to affected communities.REUTERS/Deepa Babington
Cody Sullivan is perpetually in the wake of extreme weather events. As a powerline technician and co-owner of TagLine High Voltage, a Foxboro-Ont.-based utility contractor, Mr. Sullivan and his crew are often on the frontlines as storms rip through Eastern Ontario, working 16-hour days to get the grid back up and running. His expertise also takes him to the United States for storm recovery.
“I’ve seen extensive damage many, many times – people’s homes destroyed, damage to the infrastructure … knowing people will be without power for weeks if not a month or more,” says Mr. Sullivan, who’s worked in 15 states.
In 2017, during Hurricane Irma, he was posted in the Carolinas as the storm rolled through, helping with rebuild efforts. Another trip to the U.S. in 2019 started with grid recovery after a wind storm in Maryland and turned into a 41-day stint crossing states, supporting Illinois with damage following a derecho – often referred to as inland hurricanes – before heading south to Texas and Louisiana, where a hurricane had hit.
But the ice storm that ripped through Ontario in late March 2025, cutting power to nearly 400,000 homes and businesses hit particularly hard on a personal level.
“When it’s close to home, it feels a little different,” says Mr. Sullivan, who grew up in Belleville, Ont. “It’s weird to see that we’re getting those weather patterns here now.”
Throughout his nearly decade and a half in the industry, he’s watched as Canada’s aging electrical grid has been tested by increasingly extreme weather.
According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, insured losses from catastrophic storms nearly tripled between decades, to $37-billion across 2016 and 2025 from $14-billion across 2006 and 2015. The damage is showing up everywhere: a single ice storm last March knocked out power to 380,000 Ontario customers at once, snapping poles and leaving some communities dark for more than a week. Hydro One, the province’s utility, called it the worst ice storm since 1998’s historic storm.
In December, a windstorm swept through British Columbia and cut power to 120,000 customers in a single morning – the third major outage event that week alone, and severe weather in Nova Scotia triggered more than 1,000 outages in 2024.
“It’s starting to become more frequent,” he says. Environment and Climate Change Canada projects that 2026 to 2030 will be the hottest five-year period ever recorded – and the Canadian Climate Institute forecasts that heat and rainfall damage to the country’s electrical transmission and distribution infrastructure could cost utilities more than $3-billion annually over the next few decades.
Living the extremes
Growing up, Mr. Sullivan enjoyed working outdoors and wanted to pursue the trades. Alongside a group of high school friends, he applied to the powerline technician program at Algonquin College in Ottawa.
Right out of the program, he moved to Saskatchewan to start his apprenticeship rebuilding outdated infrastructure to accommodate the expanding size of farm equipment. His first winter, it was minus 50 Celsius with the wind chill.
“It was our first exposure to the trade and being outside, so that definitely opened our eyes,” he says. Alongside the elements, the work was repetitive, installing poles, stringing up new conductors, hanging the wire, then moving to the next one – often for 15 to 20 kilometres.
“That was probably the most climbing I did,” he says. “But it was good work.”
He returned to Ontario, working on storm restoration and jobs for both residential and commercial customers in Toronto. In 2025, he moved back to Belleville to take over TagLine High Voltage from his former mentor, covering Eastern Ontario. It’s given him a critical role in what goes on behind the scenes as storms intensify.
Equal parts preparation and prediction
William Graham, Hydro One’s customer operations manager for distribution lines, says most people don’t recognize the complexity of grid infrastructure and the invisible elements beyond the wires running overhead.
“There are so many aspects that can be impacted by a storm,” he says.
As storms approach, Mr. Graham says utility providers typically muster crews based on the storm’s severity and where they think it will hit hardest.
“Every storm is a little bit different,” he says. And so are the impacts. Often, powerline technicians diagnose and develop a plan to safely resolve the situation in real time. It’s not as simple as flicking a switch, says Mr. Graham.
Powerline technicians are trained for these extreme conditions, but there’s always a cost. “They’re up in the air working at heights – 30, 40, 50, a hundred feet in the air – and there’s nothing protecting you from the elements like the wind, the ice, the snow,” he says. “It is a physically and mentally demanding job.”
He says that on top of the long hours and harsh weather conditions, crews are spending time away from their families. “It’s part of the sacrifice they make to really support the community and get the power back on within,” says Mr. Graham, who’s spent close to fifteen years in the industry.
Mr. Sullivan says the job has a built-in camaraderie with other powerline technicians.
“A lot of my closest friends are people I’ve met in this trade over the last 10 years.” There are people he met in Alabama during the most extreme weather conditions that he still keeps in touch with years later. “They’ve come up here for weddings and we’ve gone down there to visit them.”
It’s part of the job, a byproduct of working in a risky trade with live wires and dangerous heights where teamwork is critical.
“The people you work with have a lot of similarities to you – same personality, same work ethic … They like to be outside, they like to work hard,” he says. “It’s a serious job, but guys have fun with it.”