Thursday, April 18, 2019

Wearing Out Their Welcome



We have a petroleum pipeline that traverses our timber, and during the past winter, CountryMark widened the right-of-way. I spent a lot of time with their supervisors and clearance crew to see that they did neat work, and did not leave butchered trees for me to deal with. Any tree that was going to need "side-trimming" was removed at my direction, just so this beast would not come in and wreck trees. They brought it in anyway, and did not even have the decency to call first. They do not just "side-trim." They leave long stubs that will die and cause rot in the stems, they rip bark, they remove so many branches that the stems they leave will not survive. They also cut tops off the trees on both sides of the ROW for 3/4 of a mile.  That ain't "Side-Trimming"! What a mess. I have to get out there now and inventory every tree they wrecked and see what needs to be done next.

They did this while the ground is saturated, and now the ROW will have to be disked, graded, and re-seeded.

2 comments:

Smyril said...

I have similar problems withan electrical utility - pretty high-handed behavior

David aka True Blue Sam said...

Butchering trees makes no sense. It adds to the utility's expense in the long haul. It's better to remove any tree in question and then have fewer touchups over the next decade. Running this wheeled rig down the ROW while the ground is saturated is criminally stupid. They are going to have to disk and grade 3/4 of a mile now and reseed the whole thing. Morons.