9,000 Trucks and 15,000 Oil Changes, All Under Our Own Roof

FirstEnergy’s most visible public-facing assets are our trucks, which display logos from ten utility companies and several other subsidiaries across six states. Customers recognize our trucks for their role in maintaining reliable electrical service because they see them on the road or at job sites, with workers up in buckets, maintaining and repairing our grid.

One place they don’t generally see our trucks is at a service station. That’s because FirstEnergy maintains all motor vehicles and related equipment used to maintain the grid almost exclusively in-house at line shops across each utility company.

Dave Sestak is supervisor, regional operations west, for The Illuminating Company. He works at the Concord Operations Center in Lake County, east of Cleveland, where he supervises the shop’s fleet mechanics. More than 150 pieces of equipment are maintained at the Concord shop, including semi tractors, bucket trucks, pickups, vans, trailers, digger derricks, bulldozers, tractors, golf carts, ATVs, mowers, snowblowers and other power equipment used in the electricity distribution business.

Aside from vehicle factory recalls, there are relatively few jobs our fleet mechanics don’t do, including transmission rebuilds and mounting large truck tires, jobs that are farmed out to specialists with the proper equipment to safely complete those repairs.

The average bucket truck covers up to 10,000 miles per year depending on service territory, with many more hours spent idling at job sites, but the average supervisor’s pickup truck covers up to 20,000 miles per year travelling from job to job, requiring more maintenance, more oil changes and more shop time. The mechanics at Concord perform more than 300 oil changes each year.

Across the Illuminating Company, fleet mechanics work in ten shops maintaining more than 1,180 pieces of equipment. And across FirstEnergy, more than 9,000 pieces of equipment are maintained, with mechanics performing roughly 15,000 oil changes each year. 

Before anyone goes to a job site, their vehicles and equipment have already been looked after by our dedicated fleet mechanics. Yet, as anyone who has ever broken down on the roadside knows, everything, including all mechanical, hydraulic and electrical components – has a service life, and sometimes, the end of that service life arrives at an inconvenient time. So, even with rigorous maintenance protocols, sometimes trucks and other equipment suffer breakdowns in the field.

While you might call a tow truck after a breakdown, our utilities dispatch their fleet mechanics, who load tools and equipment into their truck and head to the site of the disabled equipment. In the winter, one favorite tool for Concord’s fleet mechanics to take into the field is a snow sled, which they use to slide tools and equipment under trucks to speed their work in the snow – it’s easier than crawling in and out for tools and materials. While they’d prefer not to, they can have the equipment towed back to the shop when field repairs aren’t possible.

Our fleet mechanics have to do their jobs right the first time, and they need to have a wide enough skill set to tackle all manner of maintenance and repair tasks on a surprisingly wide array of equipment. It’s an enormous undertaking, and it must be completed before any line or substation workers perform service on our electrical infrastructure, and before any customers see our trucks out on the road with FirstEnergy logos.

CONTACT: Chris Eck, 330-384-7939