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Robert Price: Bakersfield chainsaw massacre still smarts
| Saturday, Jun 21 2008 4:09 PM
Last Updated: Thursday, Jul 17 2008 11:34 AM
It might as well have been a crime scene. The cottonwoods lining the dirt road running through the Rio Bravo Ranch had been brutalized, half their lush canopies amputated like gangrenous arms. And the perpetrators were still at work at the scene of the maiming, seemingly oblivious to the horror they had wrought.
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Jim Nickel was not happy. He knew the row of 10 trees pointing the way past his horse stables were in danger of growing into power lines. PG&E had notified him that radical pruning might eventually be in order.
And trimming branches around distribution lines, the 21,000-volt cables that bring electricity to residential customers, is not something ordinary homeowners ought to be messing with. Mistakes can be fatal.
Nickel, heir to the 19th-century Henry Miller water empire, had no intention of trying. Not wanting to repeat the experience of previous years, however, he had notified PG&E he wanted to check with other appropriately certified tree-trimmers before any work was started. But PG&E's tree-trimming contractor, Pennsylvania-based Asplundh Tree Expert Co., sent an L.A.-based crew to his east Bakersfield property anyway. Before Nickel knew what was happening, the deed was well under way.
"Their goal is to get clearance away from the line," Nickel said last week. "If they leave a big L-shape (gap in the canopy), they don't care. They don't make any attempt to balance it."
PG&E makes no bones about it. The uninterrupted flow of electricity, the integrity of the overall power grid and the safety of workers always come first. There's no arguing with that.
But PG&E doesn't seem interested in having anyone except Asplundh or its subsidiaries doing this so-called line clearance work, and the California utility says it doesn't keep lists of other companies that might hold the proper qualifications.
In fact, at least four Bakersfield arborists also claim to possess line-clearance credentials. And the two I talked to agreed it's reasonable to consider both aesthetics and safety when the chainsaws come out.
"You can usually leave the canopy intact," said Conway Lopez, second-generation owner of General Tree Service. "Sometimes it's more difficult, and if I see there's danger I just call PG&E. But most of the time it can look better."
Jim Bomar, who owns the Bakersfield tree company his uncle started in 1954, did contract line clearance work for Southern California Edison a couple of decades back. He says aesthetics and safety are not mutually exclusive.
"To be fair, they're not supposed to be doing ornamental trimming," he said. "They've got a job to do, and sometimes there's not much they can do to preserve appearance. But unless the line is extremely low, you can usually keep the shape of the tree. The standards they've got now are terrible."
PG&E certainly has a full plate. Last year the public utility, mostly through its contractors, trimmed or removed 25,054 trees because they were near lines — mostly in residential settings, but also in agricultural areas. Another 1,595 trees were trimmed or removed near super-high-voltage transmission lines.
For PG&E, maintaining nearly 10,000 miles of power lines in Kern County alone is a year-round undertaking. It's not difficult to imagine where the utility's priorities lie — and it's not in maintaining the perfect symmetry of customers' trees. Utilities as far away as Australia subscribe to the same tree-trimming practices, brutal as they might appear, that appear in the PG&E playbook.
Experts say the practice of rounding down canopies sometimes weakens trees or promotes unwanted growth. They say low-growing trees, such as citrus, flowering plum, crepe myrtle or pittosporum, are the answer under power lines.
So what's a property owner in a tree-loving city supposed to do?
Chalk it up to experience.
"It was a mistake to plant those cottonwoods under a power line, because it's not pretty the way they trim them," Nickel said. "That's the lesson."
Certainly one of the lessons.
Reach Robert Price at 395-7399 or rprice@bakersfield.com.