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PAGE 4 | FEBRUARY 2013


Trey Long goes above and beyond BY MICHAEL KAHN, National Rural Election Cooperative Association’s Senior Writer-Editor for ECT.coop/Electric Co-op Today F


or Trey Long, it started out pretty much like any other afternoon. For Margory Farrell, it did not.


“I was headed back to one of our substations, going down a side street. And I looked over and there was this lady laying in her yard. She was on her side, waving her arm,” said Long, a service technician at Tri-County Electric Cooperative in Hooker, Okla.


Long pulled in the driveway in Guymon, Okla. That’s when he got a closer look at Farrell, who was calling to him for help.


“My house is on a slope, and I went out to move a rock. I didn’t fall up the hill. I didn’t fall down the hill. I fell off that hill,” Farrell told ECT.coop.


“I knew I was hurt bad, but the highway patrol said later I was able to crawl about 50 to 75 feet to get out of that area so somebody could see me.”


That somebody was Long, who called 911 and put his coat over Farrell. She’d spent some 45 minutes outside, crawled as far as she could, and stopped on what turned out to be an ant bed. “They were all over me,” she said, adding that Long did his best to get rid of the ants.


“I was in terrible pain and he said, ‘I’m not leaving you until I see that ambulance has you loaded up,’” Farrell said. “He wasn’t just going to leave me.”


Farrell, 75, suffered a ruptured disc and a bulging disc, and an infection that she’s still fi ghting. She spent two weeks in the hospital and three additional weeks at a rehabilitation center.


But Long’s concern didn’t end when the ambulance drove off Sept. 20. A few


TRI-COUNTY ELECTRIC SERVICEMAN TREY LONG, LEFT, RECEIVES THE TOUCHSTONE ENERGY POWER AND HOPE AWARD FROM CEO JACK PERKINS.


weeks later he called the rehab center to see if Farrell was still there. She was.


Long and his wife, Janet, always tell their children, Rance, 9, and Laramie, 6, to do the right thing. Here was an opportunity to put deeds with those words.


“We went and got fl owers and the kids, me, and my wife went up there and talked to her for quite awhile,” Long told ECT.coop.


On Dec. 19, Tri-County Electric presented Long, a 14-year co-op veteran, with the Touchstone Energy® Power and Hope Award. That never would have happened had Farrell not called the co- op to tell them what Long did; modest to a fault, he hadn’t said a word.


“I have been so excited to tell people about how wonderful Trey was and what a sweet man he is,” Farrell said.


Jack Perkins, Tri-County Electric’s CEO, agrees.


“He went above and beyond when he stayed with her and later went to visit her,” Perkins said.


“I’m glad I got an award for it, and that’s nice, but that’s not the point,” Long said. “The point is doing the right thing.”


Farrell will be the fi rst to tell you that’s exactly what he did.


“I thank God every day there’s people like him in this world who will go out of their way to help somebody else. And he certainly did,” Farrell said. “Maybe it will encourage other people to go out of their way some time to help somebody.”n


This article was fi rst published in Electric Co-op Today at www.ect.coop.


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