RICHARD ABBOTT: Following your story (Tree chopping and slugging solar users: power co looks for answers), I write from personal experience about SA Power Networks’ tree cutters. We now have native gums – remnants of native scrub – growing in an urban street with solid horizontal branches intruding into the carriageway with a mass of vertical spindly growth emerging as a result of the constant pruning. The tree cutters in an adjacent street have left a solid branch to rub against a stobie pole and, in another place, after cutting their swathe branches are still hanging above the overhead cable.

In our case where the coastal gums have reached their natural height, SA Power Networks have elected not to replace one very short pole with a taller pole to resolve the situation of cutting.

Furthermore, it is over a decade since this urban area was designated as a severe bushfire risk area, thus still requiring the same murderous pruning of vegetation under a power line as in an area of open native vegetation such as Willunga Hill, which requires far more severe pruning than is required under an urban bushfire policy area.

It seems that SA Power Networks should be tackling the policy regulators to first have their over zealous policies revised, before going to the public with the extreme threat of removing all vegetation below their power lines. I would suggest that the native vegetation was growing before stobie poles and electricity wires were ‘planted’.

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