Florida
Duke Energy’s Florida Lineman’s Rodeo qualifies 15 local lineworkers to compete in international event
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Regional Lineman’s Rodeo events test job skills critical to power delivery and restoration
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International Rodeo competition featuring the world’s top lineworkers to be held Oct. 19 in Bonner Springs, Kan.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – At a competition powered by skill and packed with competitors, 15 Duke Energy Florida lineworkers secured spots over the weekend to compete among the most elite lineworkers in the world this fall at the International Lineman’s Rodeo.
Duke Energy’s Florida Lineman’s Rodeo in Winter Garden was one of three regional Lineman’s Rodeos that will take place this spring across Duke Energy’s service areas, displaying the talent and skills of the company’s dedicated lineworkers. Lineman’s rodeos are specialized contests that test job-related skills line technicians rely on daily to restore power day and night – often in unpredictable outdoor conditions. Events take place on de-energized equipment in a simulated environment, but participants are scored based on simulations of on-the-job work, with deductions for mistakes. Competitors are judged on efficiency, agility, technique and safety procedures.
Categories scored included equipment repair, pole climbs and hurt man rescues. Duke Energy holds three regional competitions to qualify lineworkers for the international competition – including in the Carolinas, Florida and the Midwest.
The Florida rodeo this year included one senior team, 11 journeyman teams and nearly 80 apprentices. Team divisions are based in part on tenure. An apprentice is a lineworker with less than four years of utility experience. A journeyman or senior journeyman with Duke Energy has more than four years of utility experience. The senior division in a Lineman’s Rodeo denotes lineworkers who are 50 years old or older.
“Our customers and communities depend on us to keep the power flowing 24/7, 365 days a year,” said Barry Anderson, Duke Energy Florida senior vice president of customer delivery. “We participate in these rodeo competitions to not only sharpen our skills as lineworkers, but to make sure we are working at the highest level of safety, integrity and service for our customers and our peers.”
Elevated expertise
Duke Energy Florida regional rodeo winners will join other top lineworkers from Duke Energy rodeos in Florida and the Midwest to compete in the International Lineman’s Rodeo in Bonner Springs, Kan., on Oct. 19, an international event that attracts the most talented lineworkers from around the world. The best lineworkers at Duke Energy and its legacy companies have showcased their talents at the International Lineman’s Rodeo for more than two decades.
“I got into line work just because of my love of the outdoors, helping people and turning the lights on,” said Eric Polous, Duke Energy Florida lineworker from the Odena Operations Center. “It was a great competition. We came down here and we never competed together. We grew together as a team and won third place. We are going to Kansas, and we are excited to go.”
Duke Energy Florida competitors advancing from regional rodeos to the International Lineman’s Rodeo include:
Apprentice Overall Awards
- First place – Alejandro Guillen, St. Petersburg, Fla.
- Second place – Steele Conlin, Longwood, Fla.
- Third place – Tyler Farmer, Longwood, Fla.
Journeyman Overall Awards
- First place – Brandon Bagley, Buena Vista, Fla.
Zachary Bichard, Buena Vista, Fla.
Ivan White, Buena Vista, Fla.
- Second place – Steven J. Goepfert, Dunnellon, Fla.
Lars Graylin Langlo, Inverness, Fla.
Kyle Metz, Brooksville, Fla.
- Third place – Justin Mathes, Crawfordville, Fla.
Eric Polous, Odena, Fla.
Tim West, Odena, Fla.
Journeyman Senior Overall Awards
- First place – Chet Braden, Walsingham, Fla.
Ed Filor, Inverness, Fla.
Henry Shupe, Seven Springs, Fla.
“For me, it’s extremely rewarding to be able to do this in front of my children and family. To be able to pay back to all the volunteers and everybody who put in for a good day at the rodeo,” said Ivan White, Duke Energy Florida lineworker and lead health & safety professional.
Duke Energy employs nearly 1,000 lineworkers across its Florida service area.
The Florida Lineman’s Rodeo was supported by volunteers and vendors from across the Duke Energy community. A record-breaking number of more than 50 vendors also supported this year’s event and more than 80 volunteer students from four colleges including St. Petersburg College, South Florida State College, Valencia College and Northwest Lineman College attended the event and had the opportunity to meet and speak with Duke Energy leadership.
“It’s a good time with good friends, good family and just a great opportunity to show off our trade,” said Zachary Bichard, Duke Energy Florida lineworker from the Buena Vista Operations Center.
Powering the future grid
Lineworkers play a key role in power grid improvement projects that help modernize and strengthen Duke Energy’s system against storms and other impacts, making it more reliable and resilient. This can include work to upgrade lines and poles, underground outage-prone lines where data indicates it makes sense to do so, and enhancing grid reliability through the integration of smart, self-healing technology – which saved more than 35 million minutes of total lost outage time last year in Florida.
Hiring and developing entry-level craft and skilled talent is critical to address the growing needs of residential and non-residential customers, as well as to deploy a cleaner, diverse energy mix to meet current and future needs for these customers and their communities. These vital employees also help enable the connection of more renewables and added protection from cybersecurity and physical threats.
Duke Energy continues to hire lineworker talent and works closely with community colleges across its company footprint to recruit diverse, skilled candidates. Individuals interested in a lineworking career with Duke Energy should contact community colleges directly for more information on their specific lineworker training programs including available funding for tuition.
Duke Energy Florida
Duke Energy Florida, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, owns 10,500 megawatts of energy capacity, supplying electricity to 1.9 million residential, commercial and industrial customers across a 13,000-square-mile service area in Florida.
Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK), a Fortune 150 company headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., is one of America’s largest energy holding companies. Its electric utilities serve 8.2 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, and collectively own 50,000 megawatts of energy capacity. Its natural gas unit serves 1.6 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio and Kentucky. The company employs 27,600 people.
Duke Energy is executing an aggressive clean energy transition to achieve its goals of net-zero methane emissions from its natural gas business by 2030 and net-zero carbon emissions from electricity generation by 2050. The company has interim carbon emission targets of at least 50% reduction from electric generation by 2030, 50% for Scope 2 and certain Scope 3 upstream and downstream emissions by 2035, and 80% from electric generation by 2040. In addition, the company is investing in major electric grid enhancements and energy storage, and exploring zero-emission power generation technologies such as hydrogen and advanced nuclear.
Duke Energy was named to Fortune’s 2023 “World’s Most Admired Companies” list and Forbes’ “World’s Best Employers” list. More information is available at duke-energy.com. The Duke Energy News Center contains news releases, fact sheets, photos and videos. Duke Energy’s illumination features stories about people, innovations, community topics and environmental issues. Follow Duke Energy on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.
Media contact: Audrey Stasko
Media line: 800.559.3853
Florida
Florida college Republicans group chat reveals racist texts: ‘Avoid the coloreds like the plague’
It only took three weeks for a group chat for conservative students at Florida International University (FIU) to become a place where participants eagerly used racist slurs, prompting widespread condemnation from community leaders.
Abel Alexander Carvajal, secretary of Miami-Dade county’s Republican party and a student at FIU’s College of Law, reportedly started the chat after the killing of Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, in September 2025.
But on Wednesday, the Miami Herald published leaked WhatsApp conversations in which the college Republicans made racist, sexist, antisemitic and homophobic comments, including variations of the N-word used more than 400 times. Knowledge of the chat’s existence was revealed on the same day that Republican lawmakers in Florida pushed forward a bill to rename a one-mile stretch of road alongside FIU in honor of Kirk.
William Bejerano, who the Herald noted once tried to start an anti-abortion group at Miami Dade College, was the most prolific user of the N-word. Using the slur, Bejerano called for dozens of acts of extreme violence against Black people, including crucifying, beheading and dissecting.
Dariel Gonzalez, then the College Republicans’ recruitment chair, who has recently applied to become a GOP committee member, responded to the calls for violence by saying: “How edgy.” He repeatedly used “colored” to describe Black people, including writing: “Ew you had colored professors?!” and “Avoid the coloreds like the plague,” according to the Herald.
Carvajal, who was appointed to a two-year role on the city of Hialeah’s planning and zoning board earlier this year, confirmed to the paper that the group chat was his doing, but he denied knowledge of the problematic comments until the publication contacted him about its logs last week.
“It’s been five months since this was sent and this is the first time I’ve seen this message,” Carvajal told the Herald.
“I guess to an extent, I bear some responsibility, cause I created a chat. But if I had seen this at the moment, I would have removed [Bejerano] from the chat. I probably would have even blocked his number.”
The Herald found that Carvajal had deleted 14 messages sent by other participants in the chat and 42 of his own messages before the publication obtained the chat’s logs.
He also participated in some of the racist discussions. While referring to a Black student who allegedly left FIU’s College Republicans after a member of the group “called her a [N-word]”, the Floridian reported that Carvajal wrote: “Why didn’t miggress leave?” Elsewhere in the chat, the publication reported that Carvajal used “Miggress”, “Migglet” and “Migger” to refer to Black women, Black children and Black people, in general.
At one point, Gonzalez wrote: “You can fuck all the [K-word, a slur for Jewish people] you want. Just don’t marry them and procreate.”
Ian Valdes, the Turning Point USA FIU chapter president, responded, “I would def not marry a Jew,” before changing the group chat’s name from “Uber [R-word slur for disabled people] Yapping” to “Gooning in Agartha”. “Gooning” is a gen-Z slang term for male masturbation, while “Agartha” is a mythical white civilization promoted by Heinrich Himmler, one of the most powerful leaders in Nazi Germany next to Hitler.
Gonzalez reportedly described Agartha to the group chat as “Nazi heaven sort of”.
Kevin Cooper, the first Jewish chair of the Miami Dade Republican party, condemned the group chat in a statement published to X and called for Carvajal’s resignation.
“The majority of our board voted to request Carvajal’s resignation. We have commenced removal proceedings and look forward to resolution from the Republican Party of Florida,” he wrote.
That call was echoed by Juan Porras, a Republican state representative and Miami-Dade GOP state committee member, who said in a statement: “Leadership carries responsibility. When someone in a leadership role engages in this kind of behavior, it damages the trust placed in our party by voters across Florida. For that reason, I am asking the Miami Dade Republican party secretary to step down from this position.”
In a joint statement, Florida Republican state senators Alexis Calatayud, Ileana Garcia and Ana Maria Rodriguez denounced the chats and called for the expulsion from party leadership of its participants.
“The individuals in the group chat have exposed how profoundly misaligned their beliefs are to the views of the Republican party of Florida,” their statement said. “We call for the immediate expulsion of the individuals disseminating from any level of leadership of the Miami-Dade Republican Party … We will not tolerate bigotry or discrimination.”
Multiple leaked group chats from young Republicans have created controversy in recent years.
Last year, Politico published messages from a group chat of more than 100 conservatives across the country in which users also made racist and antisemitic comments. In 2022, a Young Republican group chat from North Dakota was revealed as a cesspool of homophobic and antisemitic rhetoric.
Florida
Gas prices rise in South Florida amid U.S. and Israel’s conflict with Iran, as the stock market also reports a dip
Four days into the Iranian conflict, gas prices are rising at many stations in South Florida.
“I’ve traveled all over the United States,” says Stacey Williams. CBS Miami spoke to him as he was gassing up on the turnpike. He paid $66 for 20 gallons of diesel to fill his pickup truck. Williams has noted the fluctuations in fuel as he drives to locations for his work on turbines. He just spent three weeks at the Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant south of Miami.
“The salary we get paid per hour does not add up to what we pay for gas, housing, and food,” he says.
Mitchell Gershon is also dealing with the higher gas prices. He has to fill three vehicles constantly for his business—Thrifty Gypsy, a pop-up store at musical venues. He’s back and forth from Orlando to Miami and says fuel is costing him 20% more. When asked how he handles these fluctuations, he said, “Have a little backup cash so you are ready for it.”
The rise in oil prices contributed to a drop in the stock market on Tuesday, which means some retirement accounts dipped, too. CBS Miami talked to Chad NeSmith, director of investments at Tobias Financial Advisors in Plantation, for perspective on the drop.
“We are seeing most of the pullback today. Yesterday was a shock,” he says. He’s not expecting runaway oil prices but says investors should stay in the loop: “Pay attention to your portfolio. Stick to your goals. Have a plan because these things are completely unpredictable.”
That unpredictability has Williams adjusting his budget. “You just cut back, cut corners, all you can do,” he says.
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