The two of us are not connecting here. It has nothing to do with personal property. It has nothing to do with easements. It has to do with trees planted on local government property that are along utility lines. Once the trees are planted, nothing is done unless a storm comes through and damages them. So to hear the county executives, the governor, the mayor and council members declare war on the utility companies, threaten to fine them (which we pay in the end through our bills) while they do nothing to resolve the problem is what pisses me off.
Silver Springs? Isnt that the pinko pit where THE Governor was shot? Rockville? Dont go back to Rockville. Youll waste another year. I cant figure how PBS and NASA and 1.1B for burying infrastructure in hurricane zones are outrageous the Republicans. Yet, they insist on another 200B/year the Pentagon doesnt even want.
Not necessarily. There are currently trees in the back of my house - and my neighbors' houses - that, if they aren't maintained, can take out electricity on our block. It's our responsibility as homeowners' to prevent that from happening because they are our trees and it is in our best interests to keep them trimmed. I haven't lived there long enough to know how it actually plays out, but I wouldn't be surprised if the city or the utility company either trim them anyway or survey them and let homeowners know if there are troublesome trees. Right now my maple is too small but the next door neighbors have a giant evergreen of some kind that is perilously close to the line that goes from the pole to my house.
Which trees? My point - and I admit I didn't make it clearly - was that there are lots and lots of trees on private property that threaten utility lines on public easements. It's not reasonable to assume that the trees that endanger utility lines are all on "local government property."
At least it was just water.. The weekend I moved into my house our sewer backed up and flooded the crawlspace below our house with poo. That was awesome!!
And there are lots and lots of trees on government property. Most utility lines run down the street. Many of the power outages run along these lines. Yet, we hear the politicians whine whenever we have a storm and yet they have ignored the problem for decades. It is not all PEPCO. It is not on the citizens. We can't do anything about these destructive storms. But we can do some planning that can alleviate the problem. And that responsibility falls on the elected officials.
So in effect the government does the utility a favor but instead of the utility being thankful on being allowed to encroach on govt property (which is our property), the utility further costs us by putting more restrictions on how we can use the land and imposing on us tree trimming cost that only arose because of the utility.
But it still works amazingly well. I remember about a decade or so go we had a big wind storm up here that knocked the power out for large swathes of Western Washington. One of the coworkers noticed that all of the power trucks that were working in her area were from BC Hydro, so she pulled over and asked one of the workers why they weren't up in BC fixing their power lines and the worker had a good chuckle and said "We're already done. We've been burying our lines for years and these windstorms don't really impact us."
Yeah, luckily that was an aspect of home ownership that eluded us this time around. Our worse "water in the basement" situation came from a summer storm that dropped three and a half inches of rain in a bit more than an hour. I spent the next day with towels and a shop vac and then a carpet cleaner getting as much moisture out of the carpet as I could, and then running two dehumidifiers round the clock for about three days (and spraying about half a can of lysol twice a day to kill mold). About nine o'clock the first morning, when I was taking the second round of towels out of the drier for the next round of sopping, there was the knock on the door. It was the VFD. They were offering to pump out the basement. They were surprised I was able to take care of it myself. Most all of my neighbors needed them to pump out their basements.
Oh bullsh*t. Pepco has ignored infrastructure upgrades and tree trimming for years and got caught with their pants down. Trying to blame it on politicians and homeowners was just one big attempt at deflection. They've systematically laid off crews in favor of calling in emergency crews from other utilities after the fact, all while wildly increasing their rates (and profits).
Okay, I guess since I moved out of the DC area I haven't had to deal with any power problems (despite this area having at least as many trees as y'all) so I'm not exposed to this egregious behavior from our elected officials.
There is only one spring and it is located off of East West Highway (MD 410). I am not taking blame away from PEPCO. But it is ridiculous hearing the governor, county executives, council members and mayors cry foul when they have sat back all this time and not work on a plan on the infrastructure or take care of any maintenance. PEPCO is not the one that planted the trees or approved where they have been planted. No one has blamed homeowners here.
Pepco has the responsibility to trim vegetation from the lines, but they haven't done this over the years because someone at Pepco decided it was more cost effective to lay off the very crews that do this, in favor of bringing in emergency crews from other utilities after the fact. No government entity was restricting Pepco's ability or access to the trees. Pepco initially tried to blame homeowners fro restricting access to their property, until hearings discovered that homeowners were never contacted to begin with.
Will you guys shut the f*ck up or I'm going to get Matt In the Hat in here to talk about Long Island and LILCO and Con Ed and everything else about NY and NJ.
I have devised a Cheetos and stick contraption to help me fun faster. Wow....typing that winded me out. Better. Lay. Down. I'm going to use this to correct my time: http://www.paulryantimecalculator.com/
I've wondered that myself, and I can only say that from what I've noticed most of our power lines here in Cali are still above ground, not sure if that's due to earthquake danger or just general cheapiness. I used to live out in the redwoods along the Russian River and our power would regularly go out with every rainstorm, generally for a few days with the bigger ones. Which tends to happen when you string power lines through a thick redwood forest that likes to drop limbs.
Depending on the area, earthquakes of that severity tend to happen much, much less frequently than storm events that knock power out...