Tree Canopy Grows Thinner

Trees and power lines are tangled in competing social needs: Just as people treasure the vanishing green space around them, they don't want to choose between their bikes and their air conditioners.

Governments find themselves besieged by constituents frustrated by prolonged outages yet furious at losing trees.

"If there's anything people want, it's a reliable system," said Scott Reilly, assistant chief administrative officer to Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D). "When they didn't have a reliable system, we heard about it."

The Aug. 14 blackout, which started in northeastern Ohio, did not hit the Washington area. Still, local utilities say they are taking their cue from investigators' conclusions about the causes. Among them was the failure of FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron, Ohio, to properly trim trees to keep transmission lines from hitting limbs and causing short circuits, which affected crucial power lines. Key computer systems also failed and grid operators had been poorly trained, a task force found.

As part of broad mandates issued this spring, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission required the country's approximately 2,000 utilities to report their tree management strategies in detail last month. Meanwhile, the panel that monitors power grid operations has called for better reporting of tree-related outages. And Maryland regulators issued an order last month requiring, for the first time, that companies approach homeowners about trimming and in some cases removing trees on their property that could fall onto wires in a storm.

The new standards do not carry penalties -- for now. But as regulators push for mandatory enforcement, power companies say the new environment is what they needed to embark on more intrusive, though preventive, cutting plans.

"It's validated our approach," said Bill Rees, supervisor of forestry and right-of-way management for Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., whose service area includes Anne Arundel, Howard and parts of Montgomery, Prince George's and Calvert counties.

Like other utilities, BGE is spending more on its tree operations: $21 million this year, up from $17 million in 1999. Dominion has increased its maintenance budget by about 70 percent in three years. Pepco, which no longer owns transmission lines, will spend $30 million this year keeping trees away from its neighborhood distribution circuits. Virtually all the tree work is done by contractors who turn most of the tens of thousands of trees into mulch or firewood. The costs of tree trimming, like other operating expenses, are eventually passed on to customers, according to utility officials.

BGE is targeting several Bowie neighborhoods with frequent outages. Many homeowners who moved into the city's Levittown-modeled streets in the 1960s planted trees on their property lines to buffer them from neighbors. But power lines followed the property lines.

In some cases, the company has planted dogwoods and crab apples to replace tall maples and oaks. But BGE, like Pepco and Dominion, is not replacing the trees one for one.

"That would be a very expensive program, so we do it selectively," said Pepco's Gausman.

In the District, where the tree canopy has just begun to recover after decades of erosion, the forestry department is on its own mission to limit exposure to outages. The city is planting up to a dozen species of slow-growing trees that won't be taller than 30 feet, said Ainsley Caldwell, associate director of urban forestry. To compensate for lost height, the shorter trees are being planted closer together, he said.

Caldwell is working with Pepco to identify a test neighborhood of approximately 1,500 homes for aggressive cutting. "I'm not just looking at removing a tree because Pepco says it needs to be removed," he said.

On the trail itself, users mourn the loss of greenery.

"I'm worried they're going overboard," Tom Smith, a retired electronics executive, said last week as he strolled the path just outside Vienna on his daily, four-mile constitutional. In front of him, a contractor was cutting a maple tree in half.

A few nights later, at a meeting organized by Dels. Stephen C. Shannon (D-Fairfax) and James M. Scott (D-Fairfax), Dominion executives pledged to limit their work along two miles in the area. But they said they would be back to cut down all the trees if they appear to be in the way of power lines.

"It's just not acceptable to take the risk of having another Northeast blackout," said John Smatlak, the company's director of electric transmission.

The cutting, which started in Falls Church and Arlington County last year, is scheduled to move west to Leesburg to the last transmission tower by the end of the year, when Dominion is likely to have filed its application to the State Corporation Commission to extend the lines. Trail users already are pleading with the utility to find an alternative location. But Smatlak said the issue boils down to pure economics: Dominion owns an easement along the trail, and the cost of securing a new one would be prohibitive.