Trees. Trees. Trees.
The issue kept coming up Monday during a day-long hearing that is examining the response by the electric companies that frustrated thousands of Connecticut residents - including some who were without power for more than a week.
Some officials said as many as 90 percent of the outages were caused by falling trees.
Some critics have focused in sharply on the decision by Connecticut Light & Power Company to cut the number of line crews over the years - at a time when the number of customers was growing. As such, they have complained that the company was better prepared for Hurricane Gloria - 26 years ago - than it was this year for Irene.
With a lower amount of linemen, the company was required to call in crews from other states at the prevailing rates. Today, CL&P employs 422 workers in the category of "line mechanics and trouble-shooters,'' compared to 385 in 2001.
The opening speaker of the day-long proceedings was CL& P president and chief operating officer Jeff Butler, who has been the public face of the company throughout the storm and who strongly defended its performance Monday.
No storm in the company's history, he said, had caused more damage. He defended CL&P's response was "appropriate, effective, strong'' in the immediate aftermath of the storm, adding that 2 million customers throughout New England lost power.
One of the problems is that Connecticut has the second highest number of trees, on a percentage basis, in the United States.
All 149 of the towns covered by CL&P were impacted. Across the eastern seaboard, the storm could cost $12 billion.
At the peak, nearly 700,000 customers were out of power simultaneously. But with in-and-out outages, the overall number of customers who were restored was more than 1 million. More than 100 miles of wire was replaced, and more than 1,500 roads were blocked across the state.
During Gloria, 506,000 customers were impacted, and it took 10 days to get them all back to power. The recent storm was also worse than Hurricane Bob.
The company, he said, actually started planning for Irene six days ahead of time.
Every employee at CL&P, Butler said, "did an outstanding job.''
In the early part of the hearing, both Democratic and Republican legislators were largely deferential to Butler and did not blast either CL&P or UI officials who were testifying.
From Greenwich to eastern Connecticut, legislators and customers had initially complained loudly about CL&P's response. Four days after the storm, power had not been restored in central Greenwich areas near Route 1 like Northfield Street, as opposed to the more rural "backcountry'' neighborhoods north of the Merritt Parkway that are far more difficult to restore because there might be only three homes, for example, in a 50-acre area.
Regarding the future, Butler says it is not only "the trees and the trim zone'' because some of the problems came from the "hazard trees'' that might be 70 feet tall and are not immediately hanging over the wires. The tree-trimming cycles have basically not changed in the past decade, according to the company. The company spends about $21.5 million per year in the normal maintenance program to trim trees at a cost of about $5,800 per mi
"People are very covetous of their trees, and I am of mine,'' said Sen. Joan Hartley, a Waterbury Democrat. "Aging trees need to be tended to. ... It's something that you push off and don't want to deal with.''
Sen. John Fonfara, the longtime co-chairman of the legislature's powerful energy committee, said that legislators are seeking results from the hearing.
"This is not a showpiece,'' Fonfara said, telling Butler later that "the company and your workers did great work.''
For the first time, the joint committees that held the hearing Monday accepted testimony from citizens via Facebook and Twitter - two Internet services that were not available years ago. The hearing began shortly after 9:30 a.m. and lasted past 5 p.m. with no lunch break.