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Meet Joel Rivera, an employee focused on leading a team to accomplish one goal - keeping the lights on for his community.
Joel, an employee integral to restoring service for customers, answers questions about his passion for powering his community.
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Joel, an employee integral to restoring service for customers, answers questions about his passion for powering his community.Joel, an electric distribution and operations supervisor, leads a lineworker crew responsible for supplying and maintaining reliable power to homes and businesses in Virginia Beach, Va.
I'm from the Hampton Roads area. Growing up, I always saw bucket trucks driving by, so when I returned from college, I knew I wanted to work at Dominion Energy. At the time, Dominion was hiring groundworkers for the electric distribution field, so I applied, and spent a couple of years working as a groundworker in construction operations. In 2010, I transitioned into our design organization and worked as a designer before moving into a local and regional coordinator position. A few years later, I transitioned into a supervisor role in construction operations where I originally started.
I've been with the company for 16 years now and I lead a crew that works on the power lines. We feed new commercial and residential customers' power as well as maintain and operate power for our existing customers.
Whether we are building new infrastructure, maintaining reliability, or if a storm comes through, we must get the lights back on because it is an essential part of everyone’s daily life. So that is a huge part of what my team and I do every day.
"The best part about my job is providing a service to customers and being able to help them with a part of their everyday life. It is extremely rewarding when you can do that as well as working with a team that is excited to come to work and accomplish a common goal – helping our community."
My family is from Puerto Rico, and I was able to go there back in 2018 to help restore the residents' power after Hurricane Maria. It was an experience that will live with me forever. It was a complete rebuild. A lot of the areas we were restoring were in the mountains and were completely devastated. Seeing the amount of devastation that happened – and knowing that I played a part in getting their lives back to normal – is one of the most rewarding feelings in the world. I am fortunate that Dominion was able to be a part of that and was able to put us in a position to help.
Some people may not realize that what we do in our industry is 24/7. We all come to work and do our normal business, whether it is new construction, maintenance, or upgrading. But at the end of the day, we are on call 24 hours. When the power goes out, we respond, which takes people responding day and night.
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