It started last fall, says his mother, Debbie Montgomery. She, Luke and his little sister would take long walks in the woods behind their house near Lake Juliette. And through those woods, Georgia Power crews were building the Vogtle-to-Scherer 500-kilovolt power line.

"We'd sit there and watch them work, and Luke was just fascinated. He's always loved doing anything with his toy trucks, and one day he just started building the line."

Luke's signal to start work is when the Georgia Power "high-line" construction trucks go past his house, headed from the Gray construction office. He knocks off work when he sees the trucks pass on their way back in the afternoon. "He's even got me doing it," his mother laughed. "I'll keep looking out the window and say 'Luke, there they are.'"

As his transmission line mini-project – which traces the length of an embankment overlooking the highway – grew, those passing crews realized that they had a fellow worker in Luke, and they stopped by to talk to him. Foreman Ed Rentz's crew got together and decided Luke needed a hardhat – and brought him one with his name on it. Later Plant Scherer construction safety inspector Jess Grace cut down a safety belt to fit him and attached a lanyard to it. What does Luke use the rope lanyard for? "To climb poles," Luke said.

The Vogtle-Scherer line is now complete, and so is Luke's project. He's tied the string lines to the power pole for his house to "energize" them, and is just finishing the fine details.

Luke had put in temporaries – the temporary poles and crosspieces put over roads to keep the lines from falling on the roads during the construction. When he saw the GPC crews clamp their lines and then remove the temporaries, he took his out too.

He was just building a road, using a scraper blade, to finish up the project. He had set up some spent shotgun shells across an intersecting road, and there was a pile of them in one of his trucks. Asked "What are the shotgun shells for?" he looked up briefly from his work and said, "To stop cars." Indeed, looked at from the right perspective, they looked a good deal like traffic cones.

He's become quite a celebrity – the line crews stop and talk to him and take his picture. He's also the star of a new GPC construction safety videotape. As the videotape ends, the narrator is summing up the points made in the tape, while the tape shows an apparently full-sized construction site, complete with trucks and bulldozers. Then the cameraman backs up, and shows that the bulldozer is being powered by a 6-year-old.

Luke certainly has the equipment for a major construction project like a transmission line. "He's got a lot of money tied up in equipment," Grace laughed. When the young builder lost a tooth recently, his parents were going to buy him a new truck as a reward. "He's been wanting a tractor-trailer truck to carry his equipment in, but we couldn't find one anywhere," his mother said. They bought him a helicopter instead, but it was too late. He'd already strung his lines.

Line supervisor L. B. "Sonny" Kennedy came out to check on the construction – and told the other crew members there they'd better put on their hardhats, since this was a construction site. Kennedy jokingly told Mrs. Montgomery that Luke had broken a line construction safety rule by putting stickers on his hardhat. "Oh, don't tell him that," she replied. "He'll be ripping them all off."

The line just completed is actually Luke's second transmission line. His father, David Montgomery, was burning some brush and the fire spread to the first miniature transmission line and burned it down. "I thought he was going to kill me," his father said. The line has faced other hazards. Luke's active 1-year-old sister, nicknamed "Cricket," is barred from the construction site. "She can take all that string off the poles in a minute or two," Mrs. Montgomery said. The new line had to take a short detour around a small tree – a tree that Luke demanded his father cut down because it was in the way. His father refused to grant the easement.

Luke takes the uprights and crosspieces for the towers out to the site on a toy logging truck. He's carefully cut most of them himself, out of scrap wood. His father said, "I did come out here and cut a few for him. He was out here sawing away, and he had blisters on his little hands."

That logging truck had run off the road one day when lineman Jeff Henson was visiting. "He told me he was going to have to knock off for the day because he couldn't get a mechanic out to work on the brakes," Henson said. Another time, Henson missed seeing Luke working for three days and when Luke came back to work, Henson asked him where he'd been. "It was a safety problem," Henson said. "He broke a boot string."

Since his power line is finished – like the Georgia Power line – Luke said, "I guess I'll play somewhere else now." He goes to first grade in the fall but isn't looking forward to it. He seems to believe there'll be too much reading and not enough heavy construction -- although his mother says he does like to read books about construction.

Luke hasn't told anyone exactly why he wanted to build a transmission line. However, a member of the transmission construction crew that gave him the hardhat, apprentice lineman David Flakes, joked, "He told me he needed the money."