How Does YVEA Prioritize Vegetation Management Projects
While we would like all of our vegetation management visits to be planned and on schedule, there are many situations that arise that will take priority over day-to-day maintenance, such as emergencies or potentially hazardous conditions. The better our right-of-way is regularly maintained, the better we can stay on schedule.
Here’s How YVEA Prioritizes Our Vegetation Management Programs:
Emergency Vegetation Management
Emergency vegetation management, usually a response to storm damage or a downed line, always takes precedence over any other type of vegetation control. This type of vegetation management indicates that there is an immediate threat to public safety and all necessary resources must be focused on making the area surrounding YVEA power lines safer for the community.
Emergency vegetation management is unpredictable. We can’t plan for emergency vegetation mitigation, which often happens during a storm, but we can prepare for effective resolution of these problems. YVEA has a vegetation management crew on standby at all times that is ready to resolve an emergency situation. These crews are highly trained to quickly remove public health hazards, protect community safety, and work with restoration teams to get the power on as efficiently and safely as possible.
Hazard Mitigation
Another circumstance that requires an immediate response from our vegetation management crews is if vegetation is identified that could soon cause an outage or hazard. This scenario could look like tree branches on the verge of breaking off and falling into a power line or preparation for a large storm. YVEA crews will jump on any chance to prevent an outage or dangerous situation.
Customer Calls for Vegetation Management
When our customers call us about a vegetation issue, we create a service order and prioritize the call based on circumstance. Anything that is burning, contacting the lines, or creating an imminent hazard will be moved to the top of our priority list, other service orders will be folded into our regular vegetation management schedule.
Regularly Scheduled Vegetation Management
If members and vegetation management crews work together to keep the right-of-way clear, vegetation management crews generally only have to visit a property once every five years for treatments and side trims. Faster-growing trees due to a high-moisture season could potentially shorten this cycle. If YVEA crews have problems accessing a property for trimming this may require a revisit, which causes delays in the vegetation management schedule, impacting the entire community.
Balancing emergency vegetation management with a planned vegetation management schedule takes a lot of finesse on the part of the YVEA scheduling team. Notifying YVEA of problematic vegetation on your property and otherwise keeping our right-of-way clear can help YVEA address all vegetation with the potential to impact the power supply in a timely manner.