Around three months ago, Sandy White was pruning her trees along Woodacre Creek when she noticed a man in an orange vest spray paint a thick yellow X on a mature, streamside bay laurel. The man, a Davey Tree inspector contracted by Pacific Gas and Electric, was evaluating trees as part of the utility’s Enhanced Vegetation Management program. According to a phone app that PG&E uses to determine which trees are considered hazardous, the exposed roots of Ms. White’s bay laurel qualified it for removal.
The E.V.M. program, which started in 2018, targets dead, dying, diseased or defective trees that could grow within four feet of power lines. Yet Ms. White’s bay laurel was over 50 feet away and leaning away from the closest power lines. According to her and other residents, the app outlines a variety of factors that could qualify a tree for removal, including exposed roots, a leaning trunk and bracket fungus.
“There’s no nuance. It’s a very clumsy, basic phone app,” Ms. White said. “There’s no designa-tion or recognition that the tree has exposed roots because it’s in a riparian corridor and it’s holding up a hillside.”
Fifteen trees were marked for removal on Ms. White’s property, which lies in the Lagunitas Creek watershed’s riparian corridor that provides shady habitat for endangered species like coho salmon. She learned she had the right to deny Davey permission to cut the trees, but she was told by PG&E that she would have to sign a form holding her liable for any future damages the trees caused. Ultimately, she refused to have them cut, fearing their removal would cause erosion significant enough for the creekbank to fall apart.
The utility has declined to confirm that homeowners assume liability when they block the removal of trees.
PG&E was found responsible for sparking multiple deadly blazes in California, including the Camp Fire in 2018 and the Dixie Fire in 2021, due to outdated equipment. The utility has been under increased scrutiny from the California Public Utilities Commission to remove trees that pose a hazard to their equipment, and the enhanced vegetation management program is, in some ways, making up for the lack of tree maintenance in years past.
The utility has completed more than 6,300 miles of E.V.M. work since 2019 and 1,800 more miles are expected in 2022. The program is estimated to take a decade to complete, and PG&E will need to continue cutting trees to meet its mileage targets. A proposed Senate Bill, S.B. 396, would make it easier for PG&E to cut down trees through a variety of tactics, including by limiting a landowner’s “right to be heard” solely to the utility rather than to a public agency. Critics say landowners should have the right to appeal to an agency other than the one attempting to remove their trees, and several groups have signed letters opposing S.B. 396, including the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity. Another proposed bill, S.B. 884, addresses the need to prevent wildfires by expediting the undergrounding of utility lines in high fire-risk zones rather than removing trees.
PG&E designates West Marin as a high fire-threat district, and some areas are in elevated or extreme risk zones. Though residents understand the importance of keeping limbs off power lines, they say the E.V.M. program ignores the need to maintain a healthy ecosystem and deflects blame from PG&E’s outdated equipment onto trees. And trees have critical roles to play.
Sarah Phillips, the urban streams program manager with the Marin Resource Conservation District and chair of the Lagunitas Creek Technical Advisory Committee, has worked to safeguard the watershed and its endangered species for over a decade. Last year, she considered reaching out to PG&E for leftover wood from their maintenance work to use for enhancing fish habitat. Ms. Phillips said woody debris in Lagunitas Creek and its tributaries creates important habitat for aquatic species by providing refuge, foraging sites and flow diversity. “I had no idea that soon, within a few months, they would be coming in and marking all these trees to be removed in the watershed where we’re trying to improve habitat for fish,” she said.
In February, she started receiving complaints from homeowners who had trees marked for removal along the riparian corridor, so she set up a meeting with PG&E.
Ms. Phillips met with Daniel McBride, the Bay Area supervisor for the E.V.M. program, and explained the ecological importance of trees along the creek. She noted that millions of dollars from grant funders and other entities had been shelled out to conserve the Lagunitas Creek riparian corridor, and that fixing a failed creekbank could cost a homeowner between $100,000 and $200,000.
According to Ms. Phillips, Mr. McBride agreed that it did not make sense to remove some of the trees that had been marked for removal, but he understood why inspectors had marked them due to how they would have rated on the app.
After the meeting, Ms. Phillips followed up with the utility. She was told that it had no plans to change its assessment tool, and that many of her concerns were already accounted for in the program’s “extensive environmental review.”
“Our team of expert biologists, cultural resource specialists and other scientists conduct an environmental screening of each project,” PG&E spokeswoman Deanna Contreras wrote in an email. “This includes identifying sensitive and protected resources that may be present in the proposed work areas, such as any critical habitat, threatened and endangered wildlife and plant species or cultural resources that need to be protected during work.”
Ms. Contreras said PG&E’s environmental teams are trained in best management practices and measures to manage erosion, protect waterways and prevent impacts to sensitive resources. The utility did not state whether all trees undergo the environmental screening or when it is conducted.
Last month, the Lagunitas Creek Technical Advisory Committee, a collaborative group organized under Marin Water, sent a letter to Mr. McBride and elected officials expressing their concerns. “Lagunitas Creek and its tributaries provide habitat [for federally and state-protected species],” they wrote. “Please consider developing a special circumstances/location-based as-sessment that includes habitat protection, especially in riparian corridors.”
PG&E says that the E.V.M. program is meant to be “collaborative” and “conversation-based,” and residents aren’t shy about holding the utility to its promise. Several counties across Northern California, including Santa Cruz, Napa and Sonoma, have expressed concern regarding PG&E’s tree cutting tactics. Last year, the City of Santa Cruz complained to PG&E that the E.V.M. program was endangering the water supply and that fuel conditions were worse than prior to tree removal. Many across county lines agree the problem isn’t their trees, but PG&E’s outdated equipment.
A report written by a Sierra Club task force describes how PG&E has failed to adopt widely used technology that can significantly decrease the risk of wildfires, such as computerized circuit breakers that switch off the electrical current when a fault is detected. Additionally, insulated wire known as “tree wire,” can protect wires from sparking when a tree or other object, such as a party balloon, touches the line. According to the report, the C.P.U.C. hasn’t pressured PG&E to insulate its wires and has largely ignored the safety improvements offered by computerized circuit breakers.
Ms. Contreras noted that PG&E has installed insulation along more than three miles of power lines in Marin and committed to undergrounding three more miles of line. Undergrounding is expensive, but some residents say that the cost of not undergrounding lines will be higher in the long term.
In an opinion piece for the San Francisco Chronicle, Inverness Park resident Bob Johnston estimated that it would cost California electric utilities $87 billion to underground their distribution lines in rural areas over the next 30 years, compared to the $174 billion it would cost them to continue their fire prevention policies.
Although E.V.M. work is not being done in Inverness, Mr. Johnston said 12 large fir trees were marked for removal on his street. Most of the trees have bracket fungus, or what PG&E calls “conks.” Mr. Johnston also noticed that inspectors marked trees with two trunks, called “co-doms.” He turned to a local arborist, Art Tyson, for a second opinion, and Mr. Tyson said trees with conks or co-doms should not necessarily be removed.
Mr. Johnston helped form a neighborhood committee that advises residents on obtaining second opinions from Mr. Tyson and appealing their marked trees. Mr. Tyson, who has been working with residents affected by E.V.M. for the last few years, says he often agrees with PG&E’s assessments and understands they have a tough job. Recently, though, he’s been disagreeing with their evaluation more often than not.
“I think they’re making some of these decisions to remove trees because they’re afraid of what might happen, rather than because of what they know,” he said.
Mr. Tyson would like to see PG&E conduct more imaging—a process in which sensors placed around a trunk use sound and radio waves to detect the amount of decay inside the tree. He said imaging can take away some of the guesswork and allow for more informed decisions.
Marin residents agree that tree assessments should rely on more than just a phone app, and they are pushing for an alternative to E.V.M. that accounts for both wildfire prevention and riparian habitat health. “There’s got to be some kind of give and take,” Ms. Phillips said. “If we’re also charged to save endangered species as best as we can and we’re spending millions of dollars putting habitat enhancement projects into this watershed, then what good is it going in there and chopping down all the trees?”