It’s a perfect November morning with calm blue skies and mild, balmy weather — ideal conditions for more than 50 men to learn how to scale towering utility poles and install power lines, tasks they will soon have to complete regardless of heat waves, rain or snow.
The students are part of CenterPoint Energy’s latest crop of apprentices training to be journeymen linemen, the workers who restore power to impatient Houstonians after a storm blows through.
What’s unusual, though, is the size of this morning’s group. It’s more than double the number of trainees in the Houston utility’s typical cohorts — that’s by design…