What the Utility Arborist Taught Me
A career spent watching line-clearance crews changes how you think about pruning, about liability, and about the trees we chose to plant under wires.
Kyle D. Peczkowski
Board Certified Master Arborist & Urban Forester
The most consequential arborists in California are the ones the public complains about most: the line-clearance crews who prune around distribution lines every year.
It is easy to look at a V-trimmed sycamore and be angry at the crew that did it. It is harder to look at the same tree and be angry at the 1960s planting plan that put a large-stature species directly under a 12kV conductor. The crew is doing what physics and the Public Resources Code require. The planning decision was made two generations ago.
I have spent enough time riding along with utility crews to know that the good ones are among the best pruners in the industry. They cut fast, they cut consistently, and they follow ANSI A300 more strictly than most municipal contractors. The bad ones are bad in ways that get people killed.
The lesson I took from those ride-alongs is that the specification for a tree begins the day it is planted, and the biggest gift a forester can give a utility crew is not planting the wrong tree in the wrong place to begin with.
The right-tree-right-place slogan is not about aesthetics. It is about not asking someone in a bucket truck to solve a problem you created at the nursery.