Power, Heat & Comms: Me vs. The Ash Trees 2020

In the Northeast, an invasive species called the Emerald Ash Borer has killed virtually every Ash tree. This year, it was clear in the spring that hundreds of thousands of Ash trees were dead. This fall, the root systems as well as the major limbs began rotting, and with each passing storm, the trees or major parts of the trees would come crashing down, taking power and communications lines down with them.

In November, there were three "wires down/tree in road" fire company calls in front of my house alone (I know, because I called 911 to dispatch myself...)

Now multiply that by the thousands of ash trees up and down my road and elsewhere, and we're getting to 3rd world levels of power and telecom infrastructure every time there's a windy storm that blows through. The utility crews are great people, there's not enough of them though, and it takes anywhere from 12 to 72 hours to get things back up and running.

At least we're getting good use of that generator I bought and we're testing the upper limits of "unlimited" data from AT&T.

Yikes, that sucks. About ten years ago Houston had a similar problem. We had suffered through three years of drought that killed an estimated 30% of the trees. The following years led to all sorts of problems as they started dropping branches or falling down. Quite a few parks had to be closed because it was unsafe to walk the trails in any sort of windy weather.
People seem to have forgotten the dangers of dead trees.
-Blast

The pacific coast has endured a similar problem, due to extensive bark beetle activity in our forests, leading to many dead trees, fuel for our worst fire season.

And then there is the dead wood in some of our institutions......

additionally... the trio of tropical storms in 2004 gave me power outages from 5 to 9 days, and at that time I did not have a generator...it made a significant change to the emergency management structure of Florida...partnerships with large grocery chains gave tax incentives for them to have on site generators to keep foods refrigerated...legislation requiring filling stations to have back up power on site, and a concerted effort for power companies to trim potential overhang from impacting their power transmission lines, which often supported cable services and hard wire telephone lines... change in ownership of the public utility services, unfortunately, has not kept up with the right of way clearing effort... luckily, we haven't had many serious storms since Irma (3 day)... these situations, have however, provided a lot of lessons learned... regards

And now we have this in Pennsylvania - the spotted lanternfly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/us/spotted-lanternfly-pennsylvania.html

Back in SD it's the Pine Borer Beetle. This infestations suck!