The Forest For The Trees

“The communications component of CenterPoint is unacceptable,” @GovAbbott told reporters. “Corrections are coming, whether they like it or not.”

New story in @TexasTribune covering Abbott's first press conference since Beryl slammed the Gulf Coast. https://t.co/NJyTTyw9MT

— Pooja Salhotra (@PoojaSalhotra) July 14, 2024

Abbott’s “communications component” isn’t much better.

Abbott asked that CenterPoint remove vegetation around power lines no later than Aug. 31. CenterPoint officials said during a meeting before the PUC this week that damaged trees were a leading cause of infrastructure damage and outages after Beryl.

To put this in context, Houston is basically a forest. We have more trees than we have people. I’ve had to cut down 5 trees on my lot alone in 23 years. I still have 6 trees standing. In Houston, that’s not a high number of trees for one house.

I had one tree uproot entirely, during Hurricane Ike almost a decade ago. It was a very tall pine and it took out the power lines behind my house. The tree was practically up against my house, nowhere near enough to the power lines to warrant even trimming (the lowest branches were about 35 feet up).

Ike took out so many trees across Houston it took crews a month just to clear them from power lines. The derecho of about a month back did similar damage. I lost two trees to it. Many of my neighbors lost as many themselves. Again, it took city contractors weeks just to clear the debris. And then came Beryl.

This isn’t a realistic solution, IOW. “Vegetation” around power lines would have to include trees tall enough to land in power lines if they were uprooted.(Several trees near me were uprooted in the derecho.). That or they’d have to be trimmed so severely they might as well be cut down. They’d be so weakened they’d be an increased danger to power lines and houses. Very few homeowners would agree to that, much less could CenterPoint do the job in less than a year (if then). 

And how would the city dispose of all that biomass?

The idea is blatantly absurd. And the prime example . Abbott just shooting his mouth off. The pine tree that went down in Ike was removable only because it took down my two car garage with it. That opened up the backyard enough a crew could cut up and remove the trunk, which was about three feet in diameter at the base. Crews could not have gotten equipment large enough to remove that tree into the backyard without removing the garage. And that tree, like many on the block, was “near” the power lines. (Many such trees on my block alone went down during Ike.) What Abbott is demanding is that most of the property owners cut down or severely damage their…property.

That’s going to be about as popular as a drag queen story hour in a Baptist church. Not that Abbott will ever try to enforce it. He’ll harrumph some more and then go back to his hobby horse of school vouchers. Probably sometime in August. Abbott promised swift action after the February freeze that left most of Texas in the cold and dark.

Absolutely nothing happened. It’s a pretty reliable track record.