Power Lines Replace Pines as Tree Cuts Wreck Westchester Views

Power Lines Replace Pines as Tree Cuts Wreck Westchester Views

By Elizabeth Stanton

March 31 (Bloomberg) -- Westchester County homeowners are learning the price of keeping the lights on.

Some residents have new views of the steel-lattice towers that carry power lines through Westchester, which is the closest northern suburb to New York and has the highest median home price in the state. Oaks, maples and beeches that veiled a highway for decades are being chopped down.
“I know what time it is by the sound of the traffic,” said Amy Kupferberg, who estimates that 350 fresh tree stumps behind her family’s century-old farmhouse in Greenburgh hacked as much as $1 million off its value. “This whole neighborhood has been redefined by this.”
Consolidated Edison Inc. dispatched chainsaws and wood chippers in October to comply with a state regulatory order to clear foliage from beneath high-voltage transmission lines. The record blackout in August 2003, which cut power to 50 million people in the Northeast and Canada, was blamed on overgrown trees in Ohio.
“We completed a three-year cycle of tree cutting near transmission and distribution lines,” said Allan Drury, a spokesman for Con Edison, which supplies electricity to most of the county and New York City. “Some of the work involved taking down more trees than had been taken down in previous cycles.”
To some residents, that’s an understatement.
“A lot of people feel they went way overboard,” said Paul Feiner, Greenburgh’s town supervisor. “They did a massive clear-cutting of trees that wouldn’t impact the wires.”
Quick Disappearance
A backyard view of beautiful trees helped Mathew Peringattu, 46, a nuclear medicine technologist, choose his house in Yonkers. His family moved into the $514,000 home in December. A month later, he said, the trees were gone.
Dozens of constituents have complained to State Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, said Betsey Ball, her chief of staff. Their concerns include noise, light pollution, wind damage, erosion and flooding that may occur, she said.
Loss of native hardwoods also may allow invasive trees, shrubs and vines to take hold, said Aaron Schmidt, Greenburgh’s environmental planner and forestry officer.
“We understand people are unhappy to lose trees, but they’d be even more unhappy to lose power,” Drury said. Earlier this month, a storm with winds as high as 70 miles (110 kilometers) an hour dumped 3 to 5 inches (8 to 13 centimeters) of rain in the region and uprooted trees. It left 82,000 customers without electricity for as long as six days, Drury said. If some trees hadn’t been trimmed or removed, they could have fallen on transmission lines and made the situation worse, he said.
Blackout Trigger
Contact between overgrown trees and transmission lines in northeastern Ohio caused the 2003 blackout, according to the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force, which investigated it. National standards for plant growth under transmission lines, enforced by the North American Electric Reliability Corp., took effect in 2006. Last year’s third quarter was the first in six years with no transmissionline power failures caused by vegetation, according to agency data.
“A handful of trees could knock out power to New York City,” said Gerry Cauley, the agency’s chief executive officer. While the national standards don’t require utilities to cut trees to the ground, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, he said. Contractors were hired to clear trees from 41 miles of transmission-line corridor in Westchester, Con Edison’s Drury said. “How they do it in many ways is up to the utility company,” said Stewart-Cousins, the state senator. She introduced legislation requiring the companies to inform communities of their maintenance plans. “There’s nothing that tells any utility that they have to do clear-cutting.”
Drop in Price
Kupferberg, 44, said her mother put their house on the market for $2.85 million almost a year ago, when the Sprain Brook Parkway was barely visible or audible. The road carries about 93,000 cars a day through Greenburgh, according to the New York State Department of Transportation. She awoke Nov. 17 to the sound of chainsaws, and hundreds of trees were felled within two weeks, Kupferberg said. The house now is listed for $2.35 million and hasn’t drawn any bids.
The median home price in Westchester peaked at $685,000 in 2007 and fell to $607,500 in February, according to the New York State Association of Realtors. The county’s median household income was $75,000 in 2006, fifth-highest in the state, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The change in value depends on whether a home becomes exposed to highway views or noise or only to views of electrical towers, said Robert J. Flower, whose Robert J. Flower & Co. in Bronxville, New York, has appraised Westchester real estate since 1974.
Tower Stigma
“There’s a stigma attached to having your property abutting or overseeing these electrical towers,” Flower said. “If they were losing 10 percent before because it was there, they’re losing another 10 to 15 percent because it’s now been stripped.”
Charles Spiegel, a 74-year-old attorney who has lived on the same Yonkers street since 1977, figures that his property is worth 30 percent less without the weeping willows that had helped hide transmission towers “The excuse is something happened in the Midwest,” Spiegel said. “But we never had a problem here.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Elizabeth Stanton in New York at estanton@bloomberg.net