The Tree Butchers Are Coming

This is one of many reasons why the country needs to work on power grid and infrastructure projects - one being putting utility lines underground.

I was thinking about that, if the hundred year old elm is grandfathered in some way.

I'm still thinking a bit re whether or not the tree(s) are planted within the easement or outside that line, re what they can do, short of "nail trimming" edges of the canopies.

But the basics are not hard to grasp. If you are going to send out a butchery squad, incurring all sorts of wrath for little reason (I am not opposed to trims or branch removal for good reason), a simple set of small classes, that is, one class for each, but not a hundred people in the room, with slides on how-to is a reasonable thing.

Hey sozbe, if you don't mind my asking, what part of town are you in? Columbus has many beautiful areas...

You'd think, but, again, the primary focus of the men hired is the power-line clearance. In our first (horrible) experience, it all happened so fast -- they showed up with very official looking paperwork (stamps and seals, very intimidating) and before I knew it were up in our trees with chain-saws lopping away and I'm embarrassed to say it didn't occur to me at the time to challenge them. I can't even remember if we had advance notice, but we probably did. Now we know.

Just an update... have been through anger bargaining etc., seem to be reaching acceptance. (Yes, this is minor in the scheme of things.)

Basically the city tree guys said that the power company has been trying to get people to plant trees responsibly for 50 years, and that this is just kinda inevitable.

They've been working on our area for a few weeks, a little of this, a little of that (over a large area).

One good thing we found out is that it doesn't matter if a vertical trunk is within 10 feet of a power line. They don't really care about that part. So that saves SOME of the huge old elm next door. It won't be chopped down to nothing, or just a tall stump.

But about half of it is gonna go.

They already did one phase on the tree (the power lines are on two sides, east and north, and they did the street side but will come back for the other side), they were relatively careful though, not the butchers we came to expect. I'm not sure if it's coincidence or if there were a lot of people with much-loved trees who did a lot to prepare the ground, so to speak, and this crew is being extra careful.

There have been some toppings though on our street. Ugh.

They better get with it, if they're determined to do it at all. Spring is coming and that's not a good time to do major amputations on a tree.

I just got home to find the wonderful power company tree "trimmers" cutting back one of my pines. Fine. No problem. Then I got in my front yard and found they had totally cut down another one. No reason to totally remove that tree, it could have been trimmed as well with no problem. But NO, they just chopped it down. And I never got any kind of notification about this being done. None at all. No calls, no door hangers, no emails, nothing. What the heck is going on with these people?!?!