Rachel Bahr said there are lots of reasons to love her trees while gesturing to a small fruit tree with a hammock.
“This is a fruiting pear tree, and so there's a ton of wildlife in there,” Bahr said. “There's deer, which, I know a lot of people don't love the deer, but I don't mind it.”
She and her 4-year-old son enjoy sitting in the shade, lying in the hammock and listening to birdsong. But this year everything changed.
“I came home in June and there were blue ribbons on all of my trees that said ‘remove,’” Bahr said. “They've put ribbons on trees before when they've done trimming, but none of them have ever said remove.”
Contractors working for Duke Energy have been to her neighborhood a lot in the past few months, trimming and removing trees to protect power lines. They’re also going door to door telling homeowners when work will be done in their yard.
“Our crews and contractor crews have been out doing some vegetation work that is critical to ensuring that your electric service remains reliable and safe,” said Tina Noel, a spokesperson for Duke.
Noel said this trimming is part of Duke’s long-term vegetation work. This particular project has been going since October, along a transmission line from Lawrence County into Bloomington proper.
The company says that work is necessary to protect the grid.
“We understand how important trees are to our Indiana communities, and we try to balance those concerns with the need for reliable and safe electric service,” Noel said. “However, trees and vegetation are the leading cause of outages across our Indiana system.”
But for homeowners along the route, losing trees can make them feel powerless. Bahr said she can’t see why Duke would remove her saplings and fruit trees, or why they couldn’t be trimmed instead.
“I just planted this tree in the spring, and that was marked for removal,” Bahr said, gesturing to a sapling. “So was this bush, which is nowhere near power lines and not a threat ever, I mean, even at its full size, it's not going to knock down anything.”
Duke can work on private property because of utility easements—agreements between utilities and homeowners that give the company significant leeway in exchange for service.
Real estate attorney and broker Dave Harstad said that tradeoff is necessary for a stable grid connection, but homeowners may have some recourse if they think an electric company is cutting beyond the easement.
“First thing an owner can do is, when they buy a home, look at their title work,” Harstad said. “Usually there is either a recorded electric line easement or a plat easement that allows utilities to be located on the property.”
Maps of utility easements can also be purchased from the county recorder’s office.
Still, utility companies have the right to cut down nearly any tree, any vegetation within their defined easement area.
Depending on the power line, Harstad said, utilities may be more lenient.
They could allow trees grow near a smaller distribution line, the kind you see hanging from a wooden pole. The easement for those is about fifty feet.
“Then there’s transmission lines, which are on big towers. The utilities do not mess around with those,” he said.
They’re higher voltage, longer and supply power to a lot more customers. Easements are one hundred feet, enough to cover almost Bahr’s entire backyard.
But the decision on what to prune and what to remove usually comes down to contractors in the field.
“I couldn't speak to each location along that route, but it'll just depend on what the overhang of the tree is, how close they are to a line,” Noel said. “It'll just depend on the scenario.”
Harstad said homeowners can sometimes have powerlines installed underground to avoid falling trees, but that can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
“It's dangerous to have those lines on the road, or on your lawn, and so it really is a necessary evil to trim trees,” he said.
But that’s small comfort for Bahr.
“I'm a newly single mom in a home, and it feels daunting to have that on my plate anyway,” she said. “Then just to have a large company come in and say that there's a portion of my property that they can essentially do anything they want with.”
Customers with questions about vegetation work can call Duke’s hotline at 1-800-723-9684.
