NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — For three months and 14 days, Rusty Aldridge was sleeping on a stripped down cruise ship in Boston Harbor, trying his best to get some semblance of sleep after working 14 hour days.
Rusty and two dozen other Piedmont Natural Gas workers from Tennessee were first dispatched to Massachusetts in October of 2018. Long before the cold northeast winter began to settle in. It was their job to help restore gas service to thousands of customers who had been evacuated from their homes, after an over-pressurized gas line operated by Columbia Gas burst dozens of homes into flames.
"This was not a typical Royal Caribbean cruise ship. It was docked in the harbor, there was no alcohol or entertainment. It was no vacation at all," Rusty recalls.
As an Operations Supervisor for Piedmont, Rusty typically stays in hotels when he's dispatched to lend mutual aid to other utilities - like when he spent time helping restore power following Hurricane Sandy. But officials in the suburbs north of Boston wanted precious hotel space reserved for residents who were displaced by the evacuations, which meant utility workers would spend their nights on the ship, nearly an hour away from the job sites they were working on.
Still though, Rusty and his crews simply wanted to help.
"We always offer that special Tennessee touch, but for the customers in Boston we tried to go the extra mile for them. We wanted to be a part of the effort of going up there and helping out," he says.
Rusty has made four trips total to Massachusetts since last year. On his most recent trip, Rusty helped install hundreds of new stoves, furnaces and dryers into homes that had been impacted by the disaster. The 31 year Piedmont employee says it was that interaction with customers, which has stayed with him the most, "The customers were just grateful for what we did."
