In the past few things have gotten folks predictably riled up around here like the way Oncor goes about pruning overgrown trees. Well, guess what? Whether it’s handled “sensitively,” or like a chainsaw-wielding maniac who’s had too much Red Bull, trimming back helps–especially in emergency situations. Oncor says that during the recent record snowstorm, a whopping 70 percent of the Dallas-area outages were caused by trees.
But when it came to “distribution feeders”–major electrical circuits serving the most customers–those feeders that had undergone pruning in the last four years experienced about one-third the number of outages as those feeders that hadn’t gotten a haircut lately. That’s a nugget from a report on the snowstorm that Debbie Dennis, Oncor’s VP for Dallas customer operations, will deliver to the Dallas City Council this week.
