PG&E may be backing away from a program that called for the removal of hundreds of thousands of healthy trees, according to a report last week in the Wall Street Journal by Katherine Blunt. She’s the author of “California Burning,” which chronicled the utility’s history of failing to maintain its infrastructure.
PG&E started denuding the landscapearound its power lines in 2018, in the belief that removing trees that could fall on the lines would reduce the likelihood of wildfire. The program was not subject to CEQA, and the company never made its environmental analyses available to the public. Contractors marked trees that leaned downhill away from powerlines as potentially dangerous; misidentified species; and incorrectly identified cosmetic irregularities as indications that trees were diseased.
Blunt reported that PG&E spent $2.5 billion on the program, which it says resulted in a 7% reduction in ignitions when “measured across a full year.” She wrote that Chief Operating Officer Sumeet Singh said the program “was created using the best information the company had at the time.”
But in 2021, the Sierra Club California’s Utility Wildfire Prevention Taskforce released a white paper called “The Harmful Effects of PG&E’s Tree Removal Practices and Recommended Alternatives to Prevent Utility Wildfires.” Their research reflects that PG&E failed to avail itself of technological solutions like triple-insulated conductor cables and computerized circuit breakers; that the company violated landowners’ rights and harmed the environment; and that the personnel inspecting the trees for risk factors were unqualified.
Heritage oaks, redwood trees, and acres of habitat came down on private and public lands, in riparian corridors and steep hillsides in all seasons.
Now PG&E says the work was “largely ineffective,” and that it will rely on power line settings that shut off power within a fraction of a second of being hit.
Nancy Macy is the chair of the Valley Women’s Club’s Environmental committee in the San Lorenzo Valley, and a member of the taskforce that wrote the Sierra Club white paper. The Wall Street Journal report did not fill her with overweening optimism for the safety of the trees in PG&E’s service territories.
“You’d think it was ending, wouldn’t you?” she said laughing. “It’s not. It’s still around in a different name. Number one, they’re going to keep cutting down the trees they already inspected. And of course their inspections were not done by certified arborists or registered professional foresters. They might have been quote-unquote, overseen by them, but that’s just complete BS.”
“Am I skeptical? Yeah, I’m skeptical of everything PG&E does or says,” added Walter Smith, a former logger and longtime environmental advocate who raises goats in Willits. He’s fought with PG&E contractors for years, refusing to allow them to take down his trees. Like Macy, he expects that EVM, or enhanced vegetation management, will continue under another name or acronym.
“I foresee an ongoing battle with them over trees that, at least on my property, I’m not going to allow them to cut because they don’t pose any more threat on the lines than any of the other trees [they] didn’t mark,” he predicted. “The EVM may be over as they had practiced it, and certainly doesn’t do us any good up here where I live, because they’ve already done their dirty work.”
Steve Wood lives near Faulkner Park outside Boonville, where neighbors challenged PG&E’s assessment of dozens of large healthy redwood trees. He wrote in an email that he is “cautiously optimistic about this new approach, though the corporation has not won any points with me for thoughtfulness or transparency throughout this crisis, and I will continue to stay alert and parse their statements carefully. The enormous waste of labor during the inspection period as we witness in our neighborhood was appalling. Several waves of inspector trainees (who) passed through Faulkner Park and the vicinity, many of whom had come from faraway States…Several allowed as how they had never seen a Redwood tree.”
Macy elaborated on her characterization, pointing out that, “The same people who are cutting down the trees and making money from it are doing the inspections in many places. That’s happening up in Tuolumne. That happened in your area. We’re just appalled at the lack of oversight by the CPUC of those contractors. The lack of oversight by Cal Fire. We have spent hundreds of hours going to Cal Fire meetings, trying to get them to wake up to the fact that they’re allowing PG&E‘s contractors to cut down trees that are neither a danger tree nor a hazard tree nor in any way a problem.”
Last year, acting State Auditor Michael Tilden blasted the regulatory agencies that are supposed to oversee utilities, writing that the Energy Safety Office, which is part of the California Natural Resources Agency, approved PG&E’s 2021 safety plan in spite of its own review, which “found that the utility failed to demonstrate that it was properly prioritizing other mitigation activities, particularly power line replacement and system hardening efforts,” like insulating bare cable in high-risk areas. Tilden added that, “The CPUC does not consistently audit all areas in the utilities’ service territories, it did not audit several areas that include high fire-threat areas, and it does not use its authority to penalize utilities when its audits uncover violations.”
Smith says everyone in his neighborhood is on high alert when they hear the sounds of chainsaws or trucks backing up. And he’s not sure what to think about PG&E’s findings about the reduced ignitions, “Because their analyses on many other things have been faulty.” He noted that Blunt’s article quotes Caroline Thomas Jacobs, director the California Office of Energy Infrastructure and Safety, saying she was “astonished” by PG&E’s “assertion that its enhanced tree work yielded such limited risk reduction.”
Macy says the data is misleading for a simple reason, “Because the real proof of the lack of effectiveness of the program is the fact that it didn’t prevent huge wildfires. There’s no way you can cut down enough trees to protect an antiquated unsafe system.”
Wood, a frequent visitor to Faulkner Park in Anderson Valley, described himself as “Pleased but cautious,” writing, “It appears that a combination of power line undergrounding and new line sensitivity technology will permit a stay of execution for the old Faulkner trees.”
But Smith is holding off on expressions of optimism. “Since I don't trust them, I don’t trust them to do anything appropriately in the right place at the right time,” he stated flatly. “Until they prove that they can actually manage their system safely and with regards to the people and the environment that they work in, they’re not going to be high on my list of organizations to think that they actually know what they’re doing.”
