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Beauty and Utilities

If the water and gas companies told you they were going to start running lines in the air to every house, you’d say they were crazy. Yet electric utility companies would like you to believe the best and cheapest way to supply power is with overhead lines. And it is, if you don’t care about trees. The electric companies don’t. They just butcher the trees.

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They have a good reason. People get mad when their power goes out because trees or ice have knocked down the lines from the poles. People here in the D.C. area were beyond mad in early July after a huge storm of straight-line winds sucker-punched the region one evening and left trees down everywhere and more than a million people without power, some for longer than a week. It’s not pretty when the digital economy suddenly shuts down. And the temperatures that week were over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for several days.

My house never lost power. In my neighborhood, which is more than 100 years old, all the electrical lines are buried, and we seldom lose power. I wasn’t raised this way. In Missouri, the main mercy that Union Electric (now Ameren) had on our neighborhood was to put the lines over the backyards rather than on the streets. But now the trees have grown bigger, and the neighborhood looks nice but would look a lot nicer if Ameren didn’t have such aggressive policies to deal with trees around power lines. I was there one day recently when the power was taken down on the block so an army of preemptive tree trimmers could buzz through to defend the ludicrous rights-of-way for the lines. You should have seen the place afterward—rows of half-oaks, maples sliced into Vs, horror everywhere.

The electric utility industry, along with its associated arborists, keeps pretty tough standards as to how much to cut a tree around a power line and where not to plant trees depending on their sizes. When you try to turn the question around and posit that perhaps the power lines should be the ones to go away, that is, underground, like other utilities, you get a lot of guff about how much more expensive it is. But calculations of costs versus benefits of putting lines underground take into account the costs to the utilities versus the benefits to the utilities. The costs are considerable, and might even eat into the dividends that utilities pay to their shareholders, which, in the case of our utility, Pepco, came to more than $200 million in 2011. The utilities do not consider trees a benefit in any way. If they did, then leaving you with half a tree would qualify as some sort of favor.

Trees are “hazards.” They are not the plants that load up carbon at the rate of 13 pounds a year each, pump out more than 200 pounds of oxygen, cool a house by 20 degrees, lower air-conditioning bills by 10 percent or more, hold the ground against erosion, add considerably to your property value, etc. By now we know too much, or should, about the indisputable benefits of trees to let paid consultants of the utility companies, and pretty much them only, call the game.

Trees need advocates. Somebody with a mind for the landscape needs to do a fuller risk assessment of overhead lines that considers urban trees not as risks, but as assets at risk. Utility consumers are too wired up in every sense to put up with massive outages. So please let’s not ask them to choose between the grid and good shade, because they’re liable to give the wrong answer. Two members of the D.C. council have introduced separate bills to require the local utility to put more underground lines in the District, which is shockingly sensible. In dense, hot cities, putting power and safety in jeopardy with overhead lines is starting to look rather dumb. And seeing that it would take 25 or 50 years to turn this problem around, the time to start weighing in hard about it is—reset your clocks!—now.

Bradford McKee
Editor

Comments

ljenkins@lisajenkins.com August 7, 2012 11:07 AM

Dear Bradford, I enjoyed your essay on the conflict between trees and utilities, especially since it appeals to the complexities of landscape architecture and design for things that change size over time. A blueprint for planting along utility corridors is always in flux and as tree canopies envelop wires, root systems can more easily encapsulate unvaulted underground utility systems. Your are absolutely correct that "trees need advocates," and way back in 1996, the National Arbor Day Foundation sponsored a Building With Trees Workshop at the Texas A&M Research Center in Dallas--as they probably still do--with great resources for assigning monetary values to canopy trees [Tree City USA, Bulletin No. 28 and others]. Thank you for writing as it is a reminder to visit sites like the Arbor Day Foundation for technical information and data sources for tree advocacy. Sincerely, Lisa L. Jenkins, ASLA Landscape Architect Dallas, TX

stan@scaplanning.com August 7, 2012 12:16 PM

This is an important commentary. The time has come to get the utility lines underground! Most places in Europe have done this for years, with significant aesthetic and functional benefits.

eastman@artoftheland.com August 7, 2012 10:43 PM

I am so glad you addressed this way of doing things. You are right on to what needs to be done. I have overhead wires and it ruins my landscape, no matter how many design elements I have to notice beyond the wires.

rohinib@earthlink.net August 22, 2012 7:07 PM

One aspect is always missing when this topic is discussed. There are federal requirements regarding tree trimming/line clearance to which the utility companies must adhere. They are penalized if they do not maintain these requirements. Understanding the full issue might be helpful to finding a better solution.