Maintaining the integrity of our power distribution system is critical to the lives and safety of our citizens. However, wide spread power outage caused or partially caused by overgrown trees takes place often. The Northeast blackout of 2003 was a widespread power outage throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, and the Canadian province of Ontario on August 14, 2003, beginning just after 4:10 p.m. 55 million people were affected by the power outage. In February 2004, the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force released their final report which included part of the initial cause was due to a high power circuit “went out of service when they came in contact with ‘overgrown trees’”. The 2003 Northeast blackout contributed to at least 11 deaths and an economic cost estimated at $6 billion.3 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
Locally in New England, power outages caused by fallen trees or overgrown trees often happen. Overgrown vines, wet from the rain, were the cause of an outage that left more than 160 Western Massachusetts Electric Co. customers without power in the Merrick section Tuesday morning in 2013. See https://www.masslive.com/news/2013/08/overgrown_vines_wet_from_rain.html
The December 2008 ice storm in New Hampshire was similar to the 2003 Northeast blackout in the fact that the three T's played a large role in the devastation. The ice damaged tree limbs and whole trees falling onto power lines resulted in over 800,000 people in New Hampshire being affected.4 As a result of the 2003 Northeast blackout, federal regulators mandated that electric utilities take a more aggressive approach to vegetation management, and required utilities to reclaim transmission line right of ways (ROWs) from property owners that allowed trees to interfere with the integrity of the transmission line. See
In National Grid (later as “NG”), the department managing power is called "technical support" group or "support group".
According to National Electricity Code, there should be 9 ft clearance between any power lines and vegetation for all 242 volt and up power lines. Any power lines running through regular street include lines of several voltage, 242, 6000, and 110, 000, which all require such vegetation clearance.
NG claims to observe the vegetation clearance code and is inspected for all new construction. However, due to zero public and government supervision, NG and other New England power companies "basically" do not have maintained any "Vegetation Maintenance Plan." Most of these companies follow each other's heel and boldly dropped regular vegetation for all, leaving general public exposed to power failure and the danger of being electrocuted, which had often seen happening. Without being cut back on the regular basis, tree limps falling on power lines, especially during storms in a revenant scale is only a matter of crisis waiting to happen.
Please refer to an example in clearance requirement retrieved from a New Jersey county's "vegetation maintenance plan".
To make things worse, NG has actually gradually shrunk, and finally cut the vegetation maintenance work force to almost zero.
However, it is much cheaper for power companies to hire temporary tree contractor during post crisis, then to maintain the payroll of long term and regular vegetation maintenance.
Starting from early 2011, NG cut 1/5 of its "management" work force, including the whole "Vegetation Maintenance Group". Internal and industry speculations are that NG is preparing to sell the company, and in preparation, "slimming down" payroll, is part of the game to fatten up profit earnings on the earning sheet. Sale price of a business is typically defined by the amount of earning. For typical power companies, business sales price and earning ratio is between 10 to 15. With a temporarily "inflated" earning in the year ahead selling the business (NG), each dollar of higher earning, or each dollar of reduced cost, will be reflected in the business sales price of 15 dollars.
The state laws in New England, at least in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, are too restrictive to allow utilities to provide proper vegetation management.47 However, the laws regarding vegetation management for roads and highways are less restrictive. Extending these laws to apply to vegetation management for power lines should be considered.
State and local governments should extend laws regarding vegetation management for roads and highways to include electric and communication corridors. Utilities should be assisted by local and state government to streamline the property owner permission process.
The state public utility commission (either the state Senate or the House) and the electric utilities should propose appropriate modifications to existing legislation affecting trees adjacent to power lines.
The NH and MASS government should extend the rights of the electric utility to maintain its service territory and equipment including the right to trim any vegetation that might pose a hazard to electric service or safety.