Some Want Power Lines Buried to End Trims
By Elissa Silverman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 24, 2008
An invisible line divides the Washington region, and it has to do with power.
Not the political kind, the electrical kind. There are those who get it from wood utility poles, and those who draw it from underground.
The Northeast neighborhood of Brookland is on the utility pole side of the divide, and many residents want to change that. Yesterday, about 100 Brooklanders wearing green T-shirts marched down the area's main drag of 12th Street NE demanding that the city take $10.5 million already budgeted for streetscape improvements and use it to bury utility lines.
They said a big reason the commercial hub lacks vibrancy is because its trees, severed and misshapen to accommodate the utility wires, are so grotesque.
"There's the 'V' tree," said Jeff Wilson, president of the Greater Brookland Garden Club, as he walked on 12th Street in the harsh midafternoon sun last Thursday.
The mature ginkgo's branches part unnaturally in a wide V shape, making way for three black wires connected to a series of telephone poles lining the street.
Directly across the road is another type of tree common in Brookland: the crownless variety, decapitated right below the wires with the stub of the trunk tilting askew like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
The pruning is courtesy of Pepco, the local electricity company. Pepco officials say cutting is necessary to keep the lights on at the restaurants and hair salons on the block as well as the area's homes.
"We're trying to provide the most reliable service possible. If a tree sways in a storm and branches break, it can take down the line," said Bob Hainey, a spokesman for the company.
The blight caused by tree trimming is not exclusive to Brookland. Several bills dealing with utility lines and vegetation maintenance were considered by the Maryland General Assembly last session.
Burying utility cables below street level usually happens in the dense center of cities because it is more efficient and safer for transmitting the large volume of energy needed for tall office buildings.
In the District, residential areas close to downtown, such as Dupont Circle and Columbia Heights, also have underground cables, but the price tag of converting an outlying neighborhood is quite high. Pepco officials said the cost can be up to $8 million a mile, because the poles also carry phone, cable, streetlight and traffic signal wires.
That is six to 10 times the cost of stringing it all above ground, according to Pepco.
Hainey, the Pepco spokesman, said the company has not taken a position in the Brookland case because it is an issue of aesthetics.
"If this is what they want, then they've got to figure out a way to pay for it," he said.
On the eastern edge of Catholic University, Brookland is a place of rolling hills, wraparound porches and crickets chirping in the early evening. Some Victorians and bungalows in the neighborhood have sunflowers growing in the front yard and stalks of corn out back, imparting the ambiance of a small town in the Shenandoah Valley.
"When my family moved here in 1958, one impression I had driving up 12th Street was there was this canopy of trees all the way up to the Newton theater, which is now a CVS," said Deborah Ambers, who lives in her childhood home at 13th and Newton streets. "I know it existed. It's not a dream."
Where residents like Ambers envision restoring 12th Street to a bustling strip of boutiques and cafes, today it is dotted with vacant storefronts. The disfigured trees and lack of shade make it even more forbidding on a hot summer day.
"It is unbearable out here on 12th Street," Wilson said. "What is supposed to happen is the trees are supposed to complete the ceiling of our urban room."
Don Padou, an advisory neighborhood commissioner, said he has had several meetings with the city's Department of Transportation over the past several years to discuss the issue of converting the lines. Residents said they fear time is slipping away from them, as the city has started ripping up the street for the streetscape project.
District Department of Transportation spokeswoman Karyn LeBlanc said the $10.5 million available can only be used for streetscaping purposes -- upgrading the sidewalks, curbs, streetlamps and other infrastructure. "We don't bury electrical wires," she said.
But council member Harry Thomas Jr. (D-Ward 5) said he knows of nothing that would prohibit the agency from using the streetscape money for exactly that.
"I think DDOT is wrong," he said. "I believe the money should be used for that."
The neighborhood has also gotten support from Casey Trees, which is building a new headquarters at 12th and Irving streets. The nonprofit group's mission is to restore, protect and enhance the District's tree canopy.
Wilson said his neighbors will keep fighting to put lines underground.
"If this doesn't happen now," he said, "we're not going to realize our vision for 12th Street in our lifetime."
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