Cookeville Electric Urban Forestry

Objectives

• Manage vegetation in a scientific manner to deliver electricity safely and reliably by proactively inspecting and maintaining electric circuits.
• Keep ROWs accessible to expedite restoration of power during outages and emergency situations.
• Promote environmentally friendly methods of ROW maintenance. Also maintain a replacement tree program that emphasizes the Right Tree for the Right Place concept.
• Strive to remain cost effective.
• Maintain a website that explains CED’s tree policies as well as providing educational information regarding utility forestry and links to other pertinent sites such as The National Arbor Day Foundation, The International Society of Arboriculture and The Cookeville Tree Board.

Site Evaluations

All individual work sites or circuit maintenance jobs shall be inspected and authorized by a qualified CED employee or a qualified Line Clearance Tree Contractor. ROW maintenance, customer requests and emergency requests shall be prioritized and an authorized CED employee shall issue assignments to tree contractors.

• Workload evaluations shall be either project level or point sampling. Workload evaluations will be performed on new construction projects that require acquisition of new ROW Point samplings will be used on established ROWs that are scheduled for maintenance.
• Hazard Tree Evaluations shall be accomplished by several means. Inventories provided by the local Tree Board, Inspection of trees by the Department Forester and Line Clearance Tree Contractors riding out circuits scheduled for maintenance, reports from Line crews, outage reports and citizen reports shall all be avenues for identifying and removing hazard trees.

Defined Action Thresholds

Clearance standards set forth by The Code of Federal Regulations 1910.269 and North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) shall be employed during all tree trimming operations. All electric circuits shall be on a three year trim cycle. This cycle may be adjusted given consideration to rapid growing tree species, rainfall and other factors that affect vegetation growth rates.

Control Methods

All trimming is accomplished via natural target and directional trimming methods in accordance with the City Tree Code. At this time CED does not have a herbicide program. The Department maintains a list of recurrent vine locations. These sites are manually cut once per year. CED maintains a list of bushog locations as well. These areas are bushogged twice per year. All stumps have been removed from these areas and they are now covered with established fescue. The areas are readily available during routine line maintenance and emergency repair situations with no threat to equipment tires and suspension damage. Tall maturing trees along the edge of the ROW are directionally trimmed.

Implementation

CED and all Utility Tree Contractors performing work on CED’s power system shall follow all laws and regulations as set forth in this Integrated Management Plan.

IVM Quality Assurance

Daily records regarding job locations, job description, circuit numbers, weather conditions and other criteria shall be completed by the contractor and will be submitted to the Right of Way Superintendent. These records will be recorded in CED’s ROW database. A CED representative will inspect all completed work. The representative will travel to the contractor’s jobsite a minimum of once per day. A record of customer complaints or failure to meet or comply with any part of the contract or this IVM will be kept. Such failures with regard to a contract held with CED may result in the cancellation of the said contract. Contractor performance will be reviewed on an annual basis.