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Our Top Priority: Safe, Reliable Electricity

by Robert L. Hance

In the day, tax collectors were synonymous with evil. Today that honor seems to fall to tree crews.

I remember one of my first customer encounters as the new CEO at Midwest Energy Cooperative six years ago. This gentleman laughed as he said that some Midwest customers were afraid to flush the toilet because it could cause an outage. Seems we had a pretty solid and longstanding reputation for poor reliability. Just what the new CEO wants to hear.

However, previous management had put into place an outage reduction initiative, and slowly but surely the numbers started to improve.

Today we continue to build on that initiative, and our outage hours show the results. Last year, on average, each customer experienced only 2.6 outage hours related to our distribution system (not including major storms and power supplier issues). That’s down from 5 hours in 2003.

So what’s our key to success with the outage reduction program? In a word, trees. Our goal as your electric utility is to provide reliable and safe electricity, and the chief obstacle to meeting that goal is trees. In all our efforts, we strive to strike a balance between preserving the beauty that trees offer to the landscape and environment, while providing reliable and safe electricity. But at the end of the day, our mission is to make sure that your lights come on at the flip of a switch, which means we must control the growth of vegetation around power lines and other energized equipment.

Two important truths have become evident in this process.

First truth: the program works. We cut trees 15 feet on either side of the power line, giving a ground-to-sky right-of-way of 30 feet. Blinks are better. Outages are better. Customers are happier with the improved reliability.

Second truth: people love their trees and many go to great lengths to keep us from doing our jobs. Our tree crews report that customers have spit on them, threatened them, cursed them and physically run them off their property. Our efforts are not always popular, nor are the crews sent out to do the work.

We understand not everyone approves of our approach. We also understand fulfilling our responsibility will mean upsetting some. But we’re not in this to win a popularity contest. We’re in it to make sure that you have reliable electric service.

The other consideration for us is safety. Any tree in close proximity to a power line is a potential safety hazard, and we will take immediate action to remove any “climbable” tree that is too close to a power line.

We’ve talked with a lot of people about our line clearance efforts and not once has someone argued the need for safe and reliable electricity. That will remain our top priority. We don’t expect people to love this effort, but I do hope that you will attempt to understand it, embrace what we are attempting to accomplish, and support the men and women who have been deployed to accomplish it.