Yesterday I was surprised to answer the doorbell to find a yellow helmeted guy from Blue Grass Energy (BGE) on my doorstep. He said the crew was going to do some trimming of our backyard trees. BGE does this every five years to preempt tree limbs following on lines, leading to power outages. The problem was this happened to be their third visit in the last several months.
These are different folks in town. On their first visit several months ago, their chief informed me they had been contracted out-of-state. He hailed from New Hampshire. He said locals hadn’t done the job in previous years. (BGE confirms their hiring out-of-state, though they aren’t diverse to hiring locals, and at a set contract rate.) While pleasant, he didn’t give any quarter, and cut down most of my pines that had provided a friendly neighbor barrier in our front yard. It bears the clear cut look. They say they need a 10 foot clearance on both sides of the power lines. If a tree is left standing, then it’s so denuded you might as well call it a pole. Such was the case with the two pines that remained.
On a second occasion, several weeks later, I found several guys in my backyard, one of them straddled in a tall pine over by the back fence. He had done much of his work, leaving a tree virtually scalped. You would be hard-pressed to say the tree hadn’t already been within the 10’ distance. Once lushly green, it’s an eyesore now. I’ll have to take it down. These guys seem trigger happy. They reckon in inches. They had wanted to practice their art on my remaining backyard pines, but inexplicably left. I reasoned they had seen the pines weren’t really a threat.
For a time, you’d see their white cab trucks everywhere in the rural parts of Jessamine, slowing traffic and leaving behind their trademark logs spewing the ground along the roadways. The tree toll must be in the thousands. One of my neighbors lost several beautiful maples. Crews in the past would do their job doing the necessary preemptive trimming without decimating the trees. They worked with homeowners, not roughshod over them.
Well, several months passed and I thought we were rid of them. Then came last Sunday and I again saw the white trucks, combing the countryside, spying out the land. Then, yesterday, the doorbell.
I asked them, “Why are you here again?”
“Your trees need trimming in back.”
“Then why didn’t the crew do it when they were here?”
“Well, they missed.”
Walking out to our backyard, I saw up to five yellow hats with ropes, saws and poles at the ready, gazing upwards at my strand of 30 year old pines. I remembered what they did to that one backyard pine. I showed them their handiwork. Then I lost my cool? “Why don’t you leave us alone?“ They left, one with a menacing, abiding glare. The crew chief, faultlessly polite, told me they’d send someone out to talk with me.
I know I cannot win. It’s the eminent domain thing, and they do have a certain logic on their side: You shouldn’t plant tall growing trees under power lines. Fact is, those trees were already here when we bought the place nearly 18 years ago. Tall sentries, they’ve afforded shaded privacy and windbreak and in all our tempests, whether of wind, ice, or snow, never caused an outage. That’s because they stand some distance from the power lines, not under them. These folks don’t use yardsticks or tapes. They measure from ground estimates.
Why doesn’t BGE devote some capital annually to transitioning to an underground grid in older neighborhoods?
Cost factors? Consider the sums invested over many years in trimming and cutting, yet the continued, nearly annual ritual of power outages with their expense, sometimes in the millions as seen in the two ice storms of recent memory; the discomfort, and in some instances, the deaths of those without heat. Think of the millions wasted in planning for two coal fired power plants in Clark County by Eastern Kentucky Power Cooperative, now cancelled. Transition can be done incrementally.
On out-sourcing the work, as a Kentucky taxpayer, I oppose this. It’s difficult for me to believe that bringing in workers from other states is cheaper than hiring locally, even on a bid basis. I would like to see these bids made public. I think a good many of us find outsourcing, especially in a down economy, especially disconcerting.
At the top levels of leadership, BGE needs to exercise new vision in consort with our living in a different world, more complex and thus more challenging. We innovate or we perish. In 2010, the state Public Service Commission issued a scathing report on EKPC, warning it must innovate from-top-to-bottom. See Scathing Audit
The fact is that BGE and its fellow 15 member cooperatives of the EKPC have seen very few changes in their corporate leadership throughout the years. With incumbencies entrenched in old ways of thinking, you can rest assured that the white cab trucks, like white flies, will continue to blight our landscape.
These are different folks in town. On their first visit several months ago, their chief informed me they had been contracted out-of-state. He hailed from New Hampshire. He said locals hadn’t done the job in previous years. (BGE confirms their hiring out-of-state, though they aren’t diverse to hiring locals, and at a set contract rate.) While pleasant, he didn’t give any quarter, and cut down most of my pines that had provided a friendly neighbor barrier in our front yard. It bears the clear cut look. They say they need a 10 foot clearance on both sides of the power lines. If a tree is left standing, then it’s so denuded you might as well call it a pole. Such was the case with the two pines that remained.
On a second occasion, several weeks later, I found several guys in my backyard, one of them straddled in a tall pine over by the back fence. He had done much of his work, leaving a tree virtually scalped. You would be hard-pressed to say the tree hadn’t already been within the 10’ distance. Once lushly green, it’s an eyesore now. I’ll have to take it down. These guys seem trigger happy. They reckon in inches. They had wanted to practice their art on my remaining backyard pines, but inexplicably left. I reasoned they had seen the pines weren’t really a threat.
For a time, you’d see their white cab trucks everywhere in the rural parts of Jessamine, slowing traffic and leaving behind their trademark logs spewing the ground along the roadways. The tree toll must be in the thousands. One of my neighbors lost several beautiful maples. Crews in the past would do their job doing the necessary preemptive trimming without decimating the trees. They worked with homeowners, not roughshod over them.
Well, several months passed and I thought we were rid of them. Then came last Sunday and I again saw the white trucks, combing the countryside, spying out the land. Then, yesterday, the doorbell.
I asked them, “Why are you here again?”
“Your trees need trimming in back.”
“Then why didn’t the crew do it when they were here?”
“Well, they missed.”
Walking out to our backyard, I saw up to five yellow hats with ropes, saws and poles at the ready, gazing upwards at my strand of 30 year old pines. I remembered what they did to that one backyard pine. I showed them their handiwork. Then I lost my cool? “Why don’t you leave us alone?“ They left, one with a menacing, abiding glare. The crew chief, faultlessly polite, told me they’d send someone out to talk with me.
I know I cannot win. It’s the eminent domain thing, and they do have a certain logic on their side: You shouldn’t plant tall growing trees under power lines. Fact is, those trees were already here when we bought the place nearly 18 years ago. Tall sentries, they’ve afforded shaded privacy and windbreak and in all our tempests, whether of wind, ice, or snow, never caused an outage. That’s because they stand some distance from the power lines, not under them. These folks don’t use yardsticks or tapes. They measure from ground estimates.
Why doesn’t BGE devote some capital annually to transitioning to an underground grid in older neighborhoods?
Cost factors? Consider the sums invested over many years in trimming and cutting, yet the continued, nearly annual ritual of power outages with their expense, sometimes in the millions as seen in the two ice storms of recent memory; the discomfort, and in some instances, the deaths of those without heat. Think of the millions wasted in planning for two coal fired power plants in Clark County by Eastern Kentucky Power Cooperative, now cancelled. Transition can be done incrementally.
On out-sourcing the work, as a Kentucky taxpayer, I oppose this. It’s difficult for me to believe that bringing in workers from other states is cheaper than hiring locally, even on a bid basis. I would like to see these bids made public. I think a good many of us find outsourcing, especially in a down economy, especially disconcerting.
At the top levels of leadership, BGE needs to exercise new vision in consort with our living in a different world, more complex and thus more challenging. We innovate or we perish. In 2010, the state Public Service Commission issued a scathing report on EKPC, warning it must innovate from-top-to-bottom. See Scathing Audit
The fact is that BGE and its fellow 15 member cooperatives of the EKPC have seen very few changes in their corporate leadership throughout the years. With incumbencies entrenched in old ways of thinking, you can rest assured that the white cab trucks, like white flies, will continue to blight our landscape.
