NORTHERN OHIO FirstEnergy clears trees from beneath power lines

Residents are surprised to see FirstEnergy cutting trees in their backyards.
WALTON HILLS, Ohio (AP) -- FirstEnergy Corp. is removing trees from beneath major power lines following a task force's conclusion that limbs touching power lines contributed to the nation's largest blackout.
"We are not going to have lines sagging into trees anymore," said company spokesman Ralph DiNicola. "There won't be any trees."
The company's decision to take down trees instead of trimming them applies to 11,000 miles of main supply lines in northern Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Tree services have been hired to take down the trees and grind the stumps.
Akron-based FirstEnergy previously trimmed the tops of those trees to 25 feet or more below the lines. The lines are strung on towers up to 200 feet high.
Residents' reactions
In the Cleveland suburb of Walton Hills, where a tree touched a FirstEnergy transmission line about an hour before the Aug. 14 blackout, residents were angered by the clear cutting.
Margaret Lennard returned from work one day last week to see a tree service finish removing a row of trees close to her home.
"They're totally wiping them out," she said. "All of them. It is absolutely destroying the property value."
Walton Hills Mayor Marlene Anielski said she heard similar complaints a few weeks ago. She said FirstEnergy assured her then that it would notify residents before cutting.
"People have 35-foot pines and suddenly they're gone," Anielski said, questioning whether the plan is too extreme. "People have had those trees for years, and it's just devastating to have them cut down."
DiNicola said the lines were built years ago and stressed that FirstEnergy has easements allowing the utility to clear beneath the lines. He said the company will help residents buy new trees -- ones that grow to limited heights.
"We're all getting electricity through power lines located on someone else's property," he said. "We worked very hard to strike some middle ground with customers, but at this point our lines are going to be cleared."
What task force said
Last month, the U.S.-Canadian task force investigating the Aug. 14 outage that affected 50 million people pointed to the failure of a FirstEnergy computer system that monitors electricity flow in causing the blackout.
It also said the company allowed trees underneath transmission lines to grow too tall, triggering several outages when the lines sagged.
That led to a series of transmission-line failures that knocked out more than 263 power plants across the Midwest, Northeast and Ontario, the report said.
FirstEnergy has criticized the report as incomplete and maintains that it shouldn't be singled out because there were other problems in the Midwest power grid.