A PPL Electric Utilities spokesman says he thinks the tree trimming efforts made a difference, but others say the storm's severity was too much for any preparation to handle.
There is no doubt about it: Superstorm Sandy provided the region with an unprecedented walloping.
But some utility companies say that without the usual upkeep on trees surrounding power lines, it could have been worse.
“We think that our comprehensive vegetation management efforts did pay dividends during this (storm),” said Joe Nixon, spokesman for PPL Electric Utilities.
Untold numbers of branches were snapped and trees uprooted during the storm Monday and Tuesday, cutting off electricity for millions of customers across Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Tree trimming services, conducted by both the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and utility companies such as PPL and Metropolitan Edison may have helped lessen the damage, according to Nixon.
“We’ve been really proactive about taking care of the trees and making sure things are good inside the right of way,” he said. “In the absence of such a proactive program that we have, we believe we would have seen more damage and had more problems.”
Met-Ed spokesman Scott Surgeoner said that while his company knows that managing tree growth near power lines is a great practice, he maintains that it’s a little early to say if it’s had a marked effect on Sandy’s destruction.
“We do know that our vegetation management system does work. It does help with reliability,” Surgeoner said. “But when you get into storms like this, even with the work that’s been done, you’re still going to have outages related to trees.”
Sean Brown, spokesman with PennDOT, had a similar take. Brown said trimming along state-owned roads is common to help avoid falling branches and assist in melting snow during the winter storm months. Route 22 in the Easton area, which recently saw extensive work by the department on this front, is an example of the kind of clearing done every so often for preventative work, Brown said.
But winds as strong as Sandy brought — with gusts clocking around 70 mph — are no match for tree trimming, he said.
“The problem is with a storm of this magnitude, it’s taking down whole trees,” Brown said.
For New Jersey, tree trimming came into sharp focus during the storms that tore through the region last year, including an unusually destructive October snowstorm, according to New Jersey Department of Transportation spokesman Tim Greeley.
"After the snowstorm that came through around this time in 2011, this task of tree clearing came even more into focus and our crews and tree contractors hit a number of our state highways, and in particular the major interstate routes, throughout the spring and summer of this year," Greeley said. "Although I cannot provide any statistics to show the positive impact that work had in limiting tree falls and downed wires, the consensus is that there were very few closures on the interstates caused from trees being down along the mainline during this storm."
Nixon said one place the power company saw real improvement in its 10,000-square-mile service area was along the large transmission lines. On land where PPL is able, Nixon said, large swaths of trees can be cleared to prevent damage to the large structures. It was only trees out of that right of way, where PPL had no control, that posed any problems.
“I think that shows how much a difference it can make,” Nixon said.