At the Front Line of Power

For Sullivan, sitting in a trailer in Prince George's County, working out the finer points of manholes and buried power lines is the latest stop in a journey that started on a cattle farm in Georgia, 15 miles from the nearest town. Sullivan started taking flying lessons when she was 11. She came by her interest in flying naturally: Her father, a former Navy aviator, worked for Eastern Airlines and, after the strike there, for United Airlines.

He moved to Colorado, and Sullivan, her older sister and her mother had to take care of 75 head of Black Angus beef cattle. That meant that before and after school, where she played three varsity sports, Sullivan helped tend the herd.

In her senior year, after checking off a box on her SAT indicating interest in military colleges, she received an application in the mail from VMI. She filled it out but did not expect to go there. No woman had ever been accepted, and she had her sights on the Naval Academy. But, she says, she wanted the discipline of a military school, and VMI offered her an athletic scholarship, for track and field. Of 30 women who enrolled that groundbreaking year, only 14 graduated with the class in 2001. Sullivan was one. (Two others finished later.)

As it happened, her toughest challenges weren't physical. Her mother died in an auto accident during her freshman year; her 34-year-old hammer-throw coach died the next year of a hereditary heart ailment. "VMI doesn't let you stop to think about it," she says.

After graduation, she took some time off and a couple of years later found herself going to a VMI alumni event in Atlanta. She met people, she talked, and in a week she had 60 e-mails with job offers, job advice or requests for her résumé.

She had originally planned to become a Navy flier and later a commercial pilot, but United had forced her father into early retirement and he suggested that she put her mechanical engineering degree to use. A VMI alum at Pepco, Michael W. Maxwell, vice president for safety, security and preparedness, helped persuade her to come there.

He put her to work on emergency preparedness, then, after last year's hurricanes, sent her to coordinate logistics for Pepco crews that went to help restore power in Mississippi. "If there's something wrong, she holds herself accountable -- more than most folks at Pepco, I hate to say," Maxwell says. "The utility industry is known for being stodgy." That's not a word that Sullivan brings to mind. "By giving her opportunities like this, we have a chance to develop her skills and get her to stay," Maxwell says.

Sullivan says Pepco has given her opportunities she wouldn't have had elsewhere. Besides, she says, "I'd rather be out in the dirt than in the office. That's what happens when you grow up on a cattle farm." She likes climbing into the concrete manhole blocks, scouting sites where boreholes are being drilled, soothing homeowners or helping to spot a crane that has to steer clear of overhead power lines while lowering a 68,000-pound manhole box into the ground.

But being a woman has its requirements: Outside the trailer on the staging ground, she has her own portable toilet with a lock on it. Ritter calls it "the princess potty."

Sullivan, who teaches kickboxing at a local YMCA after work, says she's been accepted. "Be yourself and give 110 percent, and if you do that, you're going to earn people's respect." She says she's not afraid to ask questions and doesn't pretend to have the expertise that others have acquired over 30 years or more. "These guys have vast knowledge and they are willing to share it," she says.

At the same time, she's demanding. At the trailer meeting last week, a subcontractor hadn't figured out what was once inside an old pipe that needs to be moved; Sullivan insists that they find out before breaking into it. When discussing when another contractor might deliver a drawing needed to lay some cable that's arriving in January, she says: "Let's give them a date. If we wait, then it could be until next June."

At one point the conversation paused, and Jim Slayton asked whether there are any "issues, complaints, compliments?"

"No complaints," Sullivan says.

"No compliments," says another person at the table.

"That just leaves issues," Sullivan says. And the meeting continues.