Utilities Aggressively Cutting Trees to Curb Outages

• Get Patch’s daily newsletter and real-time news alerts.

DETROIT, MI – Here’s a riddle: If a tree falls in the suburbs and there’s no one around to hear it, did it still fall?

Oh my yes.

And Michigan electric utilities heard plenty about tree-trimming projects initiated to comply with state and federal mandates to reduce the number of power outages in the state.

Both Detroit-based DTE Energy and Jackson-based Consumers Energy are more aggressively trimming and cutting trees and are getting a firestorm of criticism from homeowners, civic leaders and lawyers, the Detroit Free Press reports.

The angry shouts have been deafening in Oakland County, where complaints were registered in suburbs such as Bloomfield Hills, Royal Oak and Rochester with mature tree canopies.

In Rochester, Jane Turner tied herself to a 100-year-old white pine that she has taken care of for three decades after the Rochester City Council declined to declare it a landmark and save it from DTE Energy saws. Despite her protest last month, DTE chopped down the tree, whose branches had already grown into power lines.

Read More

• Woman Ties Herself to Tree to Save It

The unprecedented tree removal project began in Bloomfield Hills in December 2014, but Geoffrey Fieger, a powerful Southfield attorney, filed a $54 million lawsuit to stop what he called DTE’s “secret scorched Earth campaign,” which would have resulted in the clear-cutting of hundreds of century-old hardwood trees.

Read More

• Attorney Files $54 Million Lawsuit to Stop ‘Secret Scorched Earth’ Campaign

DTE idled its saws and the two sides reached a confidential out-of-court settlement.

“It’s resolved amicably — I can’t say what was done but everyone’s very happy,” Feiger told the Free Press.

Bloomfield Township Supervisor Leo Savoie told the Free Press the controversy points out the need for more communication between the utility and property owners.

“It was eye-opening and shocking to people, including myself – the devastation they can do in just a day,” he said. “I think we have the same goal now — that everybody gets the power they need, but also the beauty they expect.”

Royal Oak officials said in July that DTE Energy cut down on city and private property without properly notifying the owners. The city threatened a grievance with the Michigan Public Service Commission, but didn’t follow through.

DTE stopped its tree clearing program and agreed to meet with Royal Oak property owners before cutting down their trees.

DTE Energy plans to spend about $90 million over the next two years on its forestry program. The utility spent about $40 million a year since 2000, before ramping up the program to $60 million in 2015, Heather Rivard, the utility’s vice president for distribution operations, told the Free Press.

The utility had been cutting down emerald ash trees, but increased the program to target trees that could threaten power lines.

Utilities in states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota, where trees are trimmed more aggressively than in Michigan, had fewer power outages, Rivard said.

Midwest utilities have been under increased pressure to trim trees since August 2003, when trees grew into a power line in Ohio and caused one of the largest power blackouts in history, affecting residences, businesses and industrial plants from Michigan to the Atlantic Ocean for up to a week in some locations.

In its 2004 “final report” on vegetation management, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said practices need to be “substantially approved.”

A similar message — trim more trees more often, and cut more of them down — came after a crippling winter storm knocked out power to about 600,000 residents of the Lower Peninsula in December 2013. Some residents of the state were without power for up to 10 days during a winter that went into the record books as one of the coldest ever.

After a yearlong investigation of the prolonged power outages, the Michigan Public Service Commission said in a December 2014 report also demanded more aggressive vegetation management.

» Photo via DTE Energy