After sitting through the “tree trial” a couple of weeks ago, I am left with several questions:1) Did Randy Gann, who changed APCo’s policy from pruning to logging, calculate the total area of the deforestation? Crunching the numbers (15 foot easement x 87,000 miles of wire) yields a total area of 250 square miles. That’s half the size of the Talladega National Forest or a strip of land a mile wide from Jacksonville to Mobile.
2) How could this decision have been made without
a. An environmental impact statement,
b. Comparing APCo’s plan to what other nearby power companies are doing,
c. Consulting with urban foresters who are experts in drawing tree-power line compromises?
Without knowing more about how the decision was made, it seems that having an electrical engineer decide to cut so many trees is a little like having a Holiday Inn Express guest do brain surgery--there is a total disconnect between the environmental impacts of this decision and the expertise of electrical engineering.
3) Did APCo calculate the health benefits it was throwing away by cutting, instead of pruning, the trees? Apparently not, since its lawyers didn’t know that forest scientists and economists can do that now, based on 25 years of research. (Florence, AL, New York City, Honolulu, and Minneapolis have all recently completed such studies.) Trees directly reduce our health costs by improving air and water quality, and they indirectly influence our health after we retire by making heating and cooling more affordable and by increasing the value of our homes, the nest egg some use to pay for long-term care. How much money have taxpayers lost from the 400 ten-inch and larger trees APCo has cut in Jacksonville since last June? Assuming equal numbers of four common tree species (pines, two oak species, and cedar) spread equally across a 10-19 inch diameter range, those trees would have produced more than one million dollars of direct and indirect health services over their remaining lifetime (this is a conservative estimate; the actual number is over $1.5 million).
In short, this is a dollars and sense decision: it costs us dollars and it makes no sense, given the little we know about APCo’s reasoning. A workable compromise might be for APCo to desist cutting trees that provide the sole shade for a house, as is true of the Wilson’s pecans, until replacement trees can safely take over that job. That way, Alabama Power would be sensitive both to its customers’ needs and to the valuable health services that trees provide.
Scott Beckett
Jacksonville
