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Tree Trimming Improves Service For All
By: Chris Reese, President & CEO
Email: contacttheceo@sussexrec.com
What most people love best about our community is the natural beauty that surrounds us. Sussex Rural Electric Cooperative strives to balance maintaining beautiful surroundings and ensuring a reliable power supply by keeping power lines clear. This is how we are able to provide our members with the most reliable power at the lowest possible cost.
Vegetation Management is the Co-op’s largest yearly expense. Trees, shrubs, and brush growing too close to power lines and distribution equipment leads to 70 percent of SREC outages. SREC invests over $1 million annually into vegetation management, tree trimming, and tree removal.
To “cut back” on potential tree-related problems, SREC operates an aggressive vegetation management program and currently has contracts with multiple tree companies to trim the cooperative service territory’s 700+ miles of lines. Our tree-trimming contractors look for incompatible foliage growing under lines, dead overhanging branches, trees that could grow into lines, and other types of “danger” trees that could pose a hazard to the power lines. Over the last few years, the number of vegetation-related outages has increased.
This increase over the last few years stems from a variety of factors impacting our area. For one, increasing climate threats and more erratic weather patterns have made our region much more susceptible and vulnerable to weather events in recent years. We’ve seen stronger and more frequent storms in our area and have had to reckon with their aftereffects. Some organizations like the Environmental Protection Agency have speculated that weather is becoming more extreme due to a shifting climate. These powerful storms have weakened many trees, making them more prone to being knocked down and risking contact with overhead power lines.
The emerald ash borer has almost eradicated the entire population of the ash species in the area. Combined with multiple other environmental factors, there have been many whole and partial tree failures within and outside of the right of way. Ash trees are more susceptible to breaking apart once the borer has killed the tree. The quick mortality of trees that contain the ash borer also brings other animals that cause damage to the tree looking for the borer for food. Once ash trees in wetlands, poorly drained areas, and areas with substantial amounts of runoff die, they quickly start to decompose at the base which leads to whole tree failures. For an example of the impact this has had on the lifespan of local ash tree populations, outages caused by ash trees doubled from 2022 to 2023.
Learn more at www.sussexrec.com/pests.
In 2023, SREC increased its investment in vegetation management by approximately 30%. In the coming year(s) SREC will have to increase vegetation management and invest in widening cross-country rights-of-way with extensive ground-to-sky clearing and shorten its trimming cycle. In 2023, SREC hired a permanent, on-staff arborist, in order to address the ever-increasing number of hazard trees.
Using industry best practices, SREC’s vegetation management team determines which vegetation needs pruning or removal to keep the electric lines free of vegetation interference. We take into account both vegetation growth during a three-to-four-year cycle, as well as vegetation that constitutes a hazard to the lines. The National Electric Safety Code (NESC) requires 10 feet of line clearance. However, that is a minimum standard and does not mean that only 10 feet of material will be trimmed.
While it may not always be convenient to have trees on your property trimmed by our contractors, please be understanding of the fact that Sussex Rural Electric Cooperative has a responsibility to ensure safe and reliable electricity to our members by keeping our power lines free from interference. We hire professional vegetation management companies to assist with clearing trees and vegetation away from electric power lines. One tree can end up affecting the power quality for hundreds of your neighbors by causing power blinks or outages.
Our distribution lines and poles are often located within a public right-of-way along a road or highway. If a tree located on a property along such public right-of-way grows into our lines, we are legally permitted to prune or remove the tree causing the obstruction. This is true regardless of whether we possess an easement across the property.
When our tree contractors are trimming branches near our lines or removing trees to access equipment for maintenance, the wood is cut into manageable pieces and left neatly piled on the property. After a tree is pruned or removed, small tree limbs and branches are run through a chipper and hauled away. Wood that is too large for the chipper is cut into manageable lengths and left on the property, near the base of the tree. Disposal or use of all such wood is the property owner’s responsibility.
Trees or limbs that fall due to natural causes (weather, dead/dying, disease) or need trimming during a storm, however, are the member’s responsibility for removal and wood/debris will be left at the site without additional cutting/stacking.
Please note that your service drop, or the line that runs from the utility pole to your home, is your personal connection to the power grid and SREC does not trim for clearance around these lines. SREC will only trim a service drop if limbs are touching and deflecting the line between your home and the utility pole. Because these are energized lines, we highly recommend using a licensed and insured tree trimming service to perform the work.
As you know, Sussex Rural Electric is a not-for-profit cooperative, and that means we strive to keep our costs in check in order to keep our rates affordable. This extends to our approach to vegetation management. If trees grow too close to power lines, the potential for expensive repairs also increases. Effective tree trimming and other vegetation management efforts keep costs down for everyone.
If you have a question regarding trees, please email trees@sussexrec.com. Please include the location of the trees in question, and, if possible, include pictures of the trees. This will help our vegetation management team answer your inquiry more quickly.
Visit www.sussexrec.com/trees for more information on our vegetation management program.
If you have potentially hazardous trees or branches to report, send in a photo to us at trees@sussexrec.com for us to evaluate.
