Each year since Hurricane Juan, a Labour Board order requires NSP to file a “Review of Power Line Technician (PLT) staffing levels and reliability of service.” This year’s report was filed this week (read the entire report here). Ominously, projected PLT numbers for 2014 and future are blacked out (or "redacted") because of “potential employee deployment matters that remain to be determined." The report includes evidence that customers have a positive perception of system reliability and that the various outage statistics (CAIDI, SAIDI and so on) are on an overall downward trend, with some minor abberations attributable to weather. The report says that the number of PLTs at NSP between 2011 and 2013 was 185. However, when Local 1928 reviewed the red seal PLTs at NSP today, we count 169 working red seal linemen (that includes the fifteen linemen without so-called "sweaters") deployed across the province. When you count the number of PLTs who will leave NSP in the next couple of months for other jobs (conservative estimate based on known commitments: ten) and the ten linemen who are eligible to retire with an unreduced pension over the next 12 months, that could bring the number of available certified PLTs at NSP down considerably. If NSP and/or the government and regulator is concerned by these diminished (even blacked out) numbers, it has not been demonstrated.