Pepco boosts tree trimming in D.C., Md. to improve reliability but meets backlash

For many Pepco customers, the stress relief that came with a comparatively mild winter has been replaced by consternation about trees.

In the past year, the area’s largest power company has devoted unprecedented resources to trimming and removing the kinds of trees that have compromised power lines during major storms in recent years.

But those efforts have been controversial, lauded by some residents as long overdue and loathed by others who fear the loss of natural beauty and damage to the environment.

Government leaders in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties and the District said in interviews that their constituents are largely pleased Pepco is working on improving reliability. But some residents remain concerned about how aggressively Pepco is pruning, trimming and removing mature trees near their homes.

“They set it up as a choice: power or trees?” said Darian Un­ger, a Silver Spring resident whose neighborhood has lost multiple trees at the hands of Pepco contractors in recent weeks. “But it’s a false choice.”

Pepco’s tree trimming represents a concerted effort to bolster its image after a two-year period during which the company felt a backlash because of insufficient service to its 778,000 customers. A Washington Post analysis in 2010 found that Pepco ranked as one of the worst utility companies in the nation when it came to keeping the power on and restoring it after it went out.

By this past winter, Pepco had initiated a five-year, multimillion-dollar plan to correct its reliability problems. In 2011, the company increased its annual spending on tree trimming along distribution lines by $19 million from two years earlier, according to Pepco data.

“If I were Pepco, I would feel I was being criticized no matter what I did,” Montgomery County Council member George L. Leventhal (D-At Large) said. “When the wind starts to blow and the trees tumble, they get complaints about outages. And now they’re trying to remove at-risk trees, and they’re getting complaints about that as well.”

Pepco customer Margie Gustafson’s main complaint is that she had no advance notice that a tree in her Bethesda front yard would be trimmed as drastically as it was. In August, Gustafson returned from a trip to visit family in Oregon and found that the 40-foot red cedar on the edge of her property — which she has owned for more than three decades — had been shaved to its spine on one side.

Without Gustafson’s knowledge, Pepco contractors pruned the side of the tree nearest the power line — roughly 10 feet away — until it was so lopsided it appeared to be toppling in the opposite direction. A Pepco forester acknowledged to Gustafson — in person and in an e-mail — that contractors had been too aggressive in their pruning. But by then, there wasn’t much anyone could do.

“If they want to prune trees that are on your property but where the branches are next to the wires, they can do it without your permission,” Gustafson said. “That’s what they did. But they did it very radically.”