The Light Up Navajo program, which is organized by the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA) and the American Public Power Association (APPA), brings first-time electricity to homes on Navajo Nation. Lineworkers from across the country volunteer for one to two weeks each year to set poles and string lines as part of the humanitarian project.

This episode features guest Benjamin Charley, a journeyman lineworker who has worked for the NTUA for the last 17 years. When volunteer line crews come to Navajo Nation, he often shows them how to use pressure diggers to set poles in the rocky terrain. He invites lineworkers to join the project and help to power more homes on Navajo Nation in the future.

To learn more about this project, you can listen to the narrated version of the article, "Mutual Aid Without a Storm," from T&D World's Lineworker Supplement. You can also hear from two of the volunteer lineworkers who spent time on Navajo Nation: Arthur William Muñoz and Dean Frescholz, both section supervisors for Salt River Project (SRP) in Arizona. Lineworkers, thanks for all you do to not only power your own communities, but to support Light Up Navajo!

T&D Talk is a special series on the T&D World Line Life podcast channel. For each episode, companies can share their stories about how they are supporting the electric utility industry. Through their tools, technologies, products and services, they are helping lineworkers and fieldworkers improve their productivity and safety. The third part of our 2025 T&D Talk series, sponsored by Southwire, focuses on grid resiliency and reliability during the storm season. Our guest is Dr. Yuhsin Hawig, vice president of Applications Engineering for Southwire.

During the episode, she discusses how the frequency and intensity of storms are impacting electric utilities and how they can improve the wildfire resiliency of overhead conductors and make their underground systems storm-ready. For more information about Southwire, listen to Part 1 and Part 2 of the series or go to linelife.podbean.com. Thank you for tuning in to T&D Talk on the Line Life Podcast channel!

In the electric utility industry, vegetation management plays an integral role in reliability and resiliency. For this episode of the Line Life Podcast, we are featuring an interview with Dr. Anand Persad, the founder and director of research with Tetra Energy Sciences Research and Consulting.

I interviewed Dr. Persad at last year's Trees & Utilities conference in Fort Worth, Texas, to learn more about the challenges and opportunities in the utility vegetation management (UVM) industry. He has written several articles about UVM for the T&D World website, magazine and annual Vegetation Management Supplement, which we publish in partnership with the Utility Arborist Association (UAA) each June.

To learn more about utility vegetation management, make sure to register for the 2025 Trees & Utilities conference this September in Knoxville, Tennessee. The 2025 T&D World Vegetation Management Supplement will be available in the UAA booth. I look forward to seeing you there! Also, if you have an idea for an article for the 2026 Vegetation Management Supplement, please email Amy Fischbach.