Of little interest to anyone but me and my neighbors was how electricity was cut on Thursday around midnight. A cracking sound not unlike a transformer failure was followed by the light and sound of nothing as all things electrical went dead.
When the outside temperature has dropped to around 45 degrees (F) it is not an optimum time to be without electricity. 🙂 My neighbors and I each called in and were all told nobody had reported any issues and that each one of us were the first to do so.
Around 5 am I was awoken by the sound of a chainsaw and went to investigate. The crew had shown up and were shining lights up my neighbor’s tree trunk to where the top part of it was hanging on the electrical cables.
Someplace around 8 am on Friday morning the first crew had cut down the trunk hanging on the cables and been replaced by a new crew who in turn had replaced the wires between the poles. Electricity was back on.
Seven days later I’m wondering why I’m left with my neighbor’s tree trunks on my lawn. Is there a third crew who are supposed to come by and clean up after the first, or did they just leave it for me?
I can understand how their messaging system reported first-to-call to each of us, which is not really a problem. But why did not somebody leave a simple message on my door explaining what’s going on? Why is the trunk and all the branches off it still on my lawn?
It was a windy night but not any worse than not being able to tear away my pool tarp. Plus the tree is looks to be in pretty poor condition. I can’t imagine there being so many other emergencies that they could not clean up after themselves. And even so leaving a message would have been good manners. Something like “Sorry we have not picked up everything but we’ll return on such and such a date.”
This is not the first time I’ve been faced with this from Duke Energy. Last time they came out and decided to work off my lawn I had to run down a foreman to get them to come back onto my backyard and clean up.
I find that for Duke Energy to be so sloppy is plenty reason to complain as they are far to experienced to be so unprofessional.
They eventually came out and said that the “brush is due to non-preventative tree failure. Duke will not pick up.”
The fact that Duke brought my neighbors tree onto my lawn and then left it is poor to say the least.
Interestingly they also say that “All pruning is conducted with consideration for the health of the tree while allowing for proper electrical line clearance.” and “Our pruning program adopts the latest standards of the American National Standards Institute and pruning recommendations of the National Arborist Association.”
Looking at the damage they left I cannot imagine how ANSI and NAA have such poor standards as to leave this gaping wound:
Again this is moot since it was Duke that dragged the trunk onto my property. If it had simply fallen straight down it would have landed either in the right of way or my neighbor’s side. Which is the whole contention here. I let them in to access the tree from my property thinking they would act responsibly