With Election Day approaching and campaigns in full swing, PP&L, Inc., reminds candidates and their supporters that posting campaign signs on utility poles is both unsafe and illegal.

It's unsafe because PP&L, Inc., workers may have to climb poles to repair power lines and electrical equipment. Nails, tacks or staples driven into a pole can injure a climber, or tear the insulated equipment used for protection from electric shock.

Signs — even if they are put up with tape or string — may cover reference markings, which PP&L, Inc., workers would use to locate the source of problems if a power outage were to occur.

Pennsylvania law prohibits the use of nails, tacks or any metal or hard substance on utility poles. In addition, many local ordinances prohibit the fastening of signs to utility poles in any fashion.

PP&L, Inc.'s policy applies not only to campaign signs, but to all types of signs and advertisements.

PP&L, Inc. — a subsidiary of PP&L Resources, Inc. — generates electricity, provides electricity delivery service to 1.2 million customers in eastern and central Pennsylvania, sells retail electricity throughout the state of Pennsylvania and markets or trades wholesale energy in 26 states and Canada through its state-of-the-art Energy Marketing Center.