The Power Struggle: When The Power Is Out, The Trees Are To Blame

When the storms blow this winter and the power goes out in Montgomery County, it may not be Pepco’s infrastructure, or even the inclement weather itself that is to blame. The biggest problem is more of the leafy variety.

“Trees coming in contact with power lines — and trees knocking down power lines — is our biggest issue,” said Andre Francis, a Pepco spokesman.

During a winter storm that occurred Feb. 5 and 6 last year, 57 percent of all reported Montgomery County outages were due to errant trees, according to a report prepared by the Maryland Public Service Commission. Comparatively, equipment failure accounted for just seven percent of the outages.

To combat all these falling branches, Takoma Park City Arborist Todd Bolton works with Dan Landry, a Pepco senior staff forester. The two communicate often via email and phone and occasionally meet in the field to discuss plans for tree removal.

Landry said that he draws up plans for which of the city’s trees to trim and how to approach cutting them, and Bolton makes revisions to that plan. Landry then sends out crews to do the job, and Bolton sometimes oversees them on site.

But even though Bolton maintains that his professional relationship with Pepco has been nothing but top-notch, he admits that the work done by the maintenance crews isn’t always up to snuff.

“Some of their pruning is not done very well, depending on the crew that responds to the request,” he said. “They’re given standards to meet, and sometimes those standards don’t make sense, or the crews don’t quite follow the standards.”

He added: “It goes right maybe 70 percent of the time.”

The Maryland Public Service Commission’s report found that in nearly every year since 2003, Pepco did not spend enough money on tree trimming, and, as a result, didn’t meet its clearing objectives. In 2009, Pepco spent $5 million on tree trimming, a number the report found insufficient.

So Pepco is investing more time and money in tree trimming or pruning, the practice of selectively cutting branches and other parts of the tree that might cause problems later, Francis said. This is part of the company’s Reliability Enhancement Plan, a five-year program meant to radically improve Pepco’s infrastructure.

Pepco plans to spend $36.5 on tree trimming as part of its plan, which began September 2010, the report said. If the plan was never drawn up, the company would have only spent $21.5 million on tree trimming over the five-year period.

Editor's Note: This post is a part of a larger series on Pepco's progress on its reliability and Montgomery County's move for a public power option. To read more of this series, check out The Power Struggle.