It's a Living: Airfield maintenance electrician at Will Rogers World Airport in OKC

Jim True is responsible for ensuring thousands of people safely arrive in Oklahoma City every day. And that they leave the same way.

With plenty of light to guide them.

True is the airfield maintenance electrician, one of two men responsible for all the runways, taxiways and outlying buildings at Will Rogers World Airport. When a traveler is waiting for a flight to arrive at the terminal, looking out over the airfield at all the bright blue markers and spotlights that guide planes to the ground, he or she is actually appreciating True's work.

"What we do out here is quite a bit different than what your typical electrician might deal with," he said. "I'd estimate there's about half a million feet of wire out there that I've replaced myself. "

Take tracing out a burned circuit, for example, one of his most dreaded tasks. When True tries to explain the complexity of the problem to someone unfamiliar with the job, he suggests imagining what it takes to find a burned-out Christmas tree light bulb, painstakingly replacing each light one by one until the string finally comes back on.

"Now expand the power consumption and the voltages of that scenario by miles," he said. "It seems very simple with one wire in and one wire out, but when you take it to that scale it can get very confusing very quickly. "

The airfield operations are fed by two power sources through OG&E, which normally provide self-redundancy, able to switch from one to the other as necessary.

True and his partner Bryce Herring are also responsible for ensuring the backup power generators are ready to come on line in case of an emergency. And even that backup has a backup, which the men test regularly by loading it with as much of the airfield system as possible to ensure the lanes never go dark. If the main electric utility trunk line fails for some reason, it takes less than a minute for the massive engines to recover. The switchover is nearly seamless.

And if something happens to the computer system operating the generators, the system default is designed to turn on all the lights instead of going dark. Better to be too safe, True said.

The airfield's generator is a 350,000-watt monster producing 2,400 single-line volt output. Depending on the weather and time of day - a night blizzard, for example - the maximum system load for the day would be about the equivalent of powering a small town such as Meeker.

When asked about accidentally zapping himself at work, True laughed.

"If you make a mistake around here, you don't get to tell anyone about it," he said. "Because you're dead. "

The airport is working on upgrading much of its infrastructure to sustainable, energy-efficient materials. The blue taxiway luminaries, for example, are being converted to LEDs, light-emitting diodes, which are better at producing bright light in that part of the spectrum than traditional incandescent lamps. And less electricity means less wear on the lines and generators, which means greater safety for travelers.

"And then there's the cost," he said. "A lot of the lamps we use are specially made and run as high as $60 apiece. We running about 1,500-1,800 taxiway lights, about 300 runway lights, 288 guide signs with a minimum of three lamps per sign. "

True, who lives in Shawnee about 40 miles away, is on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He's made the trip from home to work in about 30 minutes - "Just don't tell the cops that," True said.

"When I started working here, I told them it wasn't their airfield anymore; it was mine," he said. "I spent part of my second honeymoon out here ... coming in every morning to turn the lights off and going out every night to turn them back on. So that should tell you something about how I feel about my job. "