By R. Bruce Wright, CPCU
Keeping the ROW clear is a challenge for most electric utility companies. With few exceptions, companies insured in our national program have programs for regular ROW inspection and maintenance, with tree trimming and brush cutting as a part of their annual plans. Some even use herbicides to inhibit re-growth.
With all this work being done, one would hope that storm damage would be reduced and that voltage interruption and irregularity claims would also be dropping. Instead, these claims continue to be a common problem, perhaps even the most common type, when we review loss runs. On a recent consultation visit to a distribution co-op covered in this program I learned about their effort to make ROW clearing more effective while still maintaining good relations with those members whose trees are a threat to the lines.
My contact told me that they had found that “conflict trees” growing in the ROW were a common cause of their outages. In some case they had documented that they had trimmed the same trees very time through the ROW going back for years. But, when they attempted to remove the trees to solve the problem once and for all, their members were very much opposed to having their trees cut down. People get attached to their trees, their privacy and to what they see as their property rights, so much so that they are not willing to see the trees removed even when it means their neighbors may suffer outages time and time again.
They could have just thrown up their hands, but the managers at this company did not want to simply give up. Instead, they tried to come up with a creative solution that would allow them to remove these trees while keeping up good member relations. They hit upon the idea of offering the members an exchange- a “tree swap” if you will- and for each mature conflict tree the member lost the co-op would offer to provide a small starter tree. They found that they could obtain small but sturdy plants from a local nursery for a very reasonable rate, particularly since they expected to buy a large number each year. By offering valued species of trees, they found that they were able to please quite a few members who were willing to lose a larger tree in exchange for a small plant of greater perceived value.
Their program is so popular now that members have begun to call and ask when they too will get a chance for some new trees. The co-op figures that in the long run the savings in outages avoided, claims not filed and overtime calls not made will vastly outweigh the small cost for the seedlings. It may not solve all of the problems, but every tree removed is a potential savings to them. Maybe your company could benefit from this approach, too.