Maryland rules govern tree cutting

When Pepco wants to cut down a tree, it looks to detailed requirements mandated by state law.

In 2011, Maryland passed the Electricity Service Quality and Reliability Act, which required state regulators to impose stricter standards for reliability and enforce new mandates on utilities. Those regulations went into place in 2012.

The new regulations set standards for everything from the frequency and duration of outages and customer communication to downed wires and vegetation management the pruning and removal of trees.

Marylands Tree Expert Law which has been on the books since 1945 and a 1914 Roadside Tree Law, which regulates trees in the public right of way, also are taken into account when utilities prune trees.

Between 2010 and 2012, Pepco looked at all of the trees around its entire system, said Pepco Senior Staff Forester Dan Landry.

Now, it trims on a four-year cycle part of the new regulations, he said.

Even though the time span is longer, the change in law leads to more of the tree being removed.

A four-year cycle means the tree will be pruned so it takes four years for branches to grow back in the clearance zone, Pepco Region Vice President Jerry Pasternak said.

Pepco is in its first four-year cycle, Landry said, so there are places in the county where it just pruned trees two or three years ago and is back again.

Trees respond aggressively to pruning, Landry said. They grow much faster the first and second year after theyre pruned. Then, the growth slows down.

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Maryland rules govern tree cutting