DC plug webinar presentation transcript

DC PLUG: Burying Lines, Raising Questions (Webinar)

November 12, 2014

Casey Trees hosted a live webinar, DC PLUG: Burying Lines, Raising Questions, in partnership with the Urban Forestry Administration and Pepco to address the impact of DC PLUG on neighborhood street trees.

The webinar presentation provided an overview of DC PLUG, the District’s ambitious plan to bury the worst performing power lines across the city, and outlined recommendations to safeguard the city’s tree canopy along the proposed burial routes.

Presenters:Maisie Hughes, Casey Trees, Director of Advocacy Emily Oaksford, Casey Trees, Planning AssociateSuraj K. Sazawal, Casey Trees, Advocacy Associate

Guests: John P. Thomas, DDOT, Associate Director of UFANathan McElroy, Pepco Staff ForesterScott Placide, Pepco Engineer

The following is a transcript of the webinar presentation. The presentation slides and a complete transcript of the Q & A session can be found here.

[Slide 1]

Maisie Hughes: Welcome to today’s webinar called DC PLUG: Burying Lines, Raising Questions. Today, we have lots of people here to help coordinate this webinar. I’m Maisie Hughes from Casey Trees. We’re also here with Suraj K. Sazawal and Emily Oaksford, also from Casey Trees, and we have guests from both the Urban Forestry Administration (UFA) of the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) and Pepco. We have John Thomas, who is the Associate Director of the UFA, and we have Nathan McElroy, Staff Forester, Pepco, and we also have Scott Placide, Electrical Engineer, Pepco. We’ll be doing this webinar together to make sure that we can answer all of your

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Casey Trees DC PLUG: Burying Lines, Raising Questions

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questions about this very massive project.

[Slide 2]

Here’s an overview of today’s webinar. We’ll start by discussing the project’s background and what we already know about DC PLUG. Afterwards, we’re going to make sure that we get all of your questions answered. In order to get your questions answered for this webinar, type your question into the question box that appears on your screen.

Let’s start by providing an overview of the DC PLUG project. If Mr. McElroy can speak to what the DC PLUG project is all about, we can get started.

Nathan McElroy: The “PLUG” stands for “Pepco Lines Underground.” Back in 2012, after a couple of the major storms, Mayor Gray came to Pepco’s CEO, Joe Rigby, and he explained that he wanted to have a game-changer. So there was a lot of work to come up with this proposal for the PLUG and that’s what we’re going to talk about now.

[Slide 3]

Maisie Hughes: Thank you. Today, we’re going to identify what Casey Trees knows about the project and outline our public comments, and we are going to inform District residents about how their community will be impacted by this project.

[Slide 4]

If you’re on this webinar, you probably already know that Casey Trees is a local nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C, with a really simple mission: To restore, enhance and protect the tree canopy of the nation’s capital. Mr. Thomas would like to give a brief overview of what UFA is. John?

[Slide 5]

John Thomas: UFA is the Urban Forestry Administration, and we are located, or housed, in the Department of Transportation. The reason we’re there is we are the front line to help protect street trees throughout the District of Columbia, as well as help manage green spaces that are dealing or managing with stormwater.

Our main goal, our main mission, for the most part, is to improve the street tree canopy of the District of Columbia, and in that action we will improve air quality, we increase the ground water retention that helps to moderate temperature as far



as heat island issues, and improve the aesthetics and other benefits to our community.

We have twenty certified arborists out in the street every day inspecting trees, resolving issues, planting new trees and making sure that our street tree canopy is something that’s here for many generations to come.

[Slide 6]

Nathan McElroy: Thanks, John. This is Nathan McElroy. I also want to thank Casey Trees for hosting this webinar. It's a great way to get the information out, and we really appreciate being invited. Maisie and the staff put a lot of work into putting these slides together.

As you know, every day, Pepco provides safe and reliable electric services. It takes thousands of personnel to do that. My part is to keep trees away from lines. In D.C., there’s approximately 700 miles of overhead wires, and we have to maintain clearances of trees around those wires.

With me today is also Scott Placide. He’s an engineer who has been living and breathing the PLUG project for pretty much all this year, and so he knows it inside and out, much better than I do, so he’s here to help with any questions.

[Slide 7]

Suraj K. Sazawal: Thank you, Nathan. We’ve all experienced the lights going out after a big storm knocked out the power. It affects hospitals and certain types of medical equipment, businesses are inconvenienced, and we worry about the food in our refrigerators beginning to spoil. To help improve service and reliability, the District and Pepco have proposed a plan. Called DC PLUG, this ambitious project is designed to keep the power running even during severe weather, by burying the worst performing, primary power lines across the District.

[Slide 8]

Now, what I want you to focus on is the word, “primary.” It would be great if all the overhead power lines would be buried. Not only would this improve reliability for residents, but it would also be beneficial to the long-term health and appearance of your neighborhood streetscape. But under the current proposal, only the primary power lines will be buried.

[Slide 9]

So what exactly are “primary lines?” Primary power lines are the high-voltage



power lines usually found at the top of utility poles. When you lose power, it’s usually because these lines were interfered with, often requiring hours of repair work. Casey Trees welcomes the burying of primary power lines, because trees near these lines are pruned much more aggressively than trees near other types of power lines. Maisie will explain the different pruning requirements for trees later in the presentation.

[Slide 10]

I will now define a few other important terms that you should know, for example, “secondary and communication lines”. These types of wires, including ones from phone and cable companies produce a lot less voltage, connect directly to residences, and are not included in this plan. They will remain aboveground on the utility pole.

[Slide 11]

The next term is “electrical transformers”. An electrical transformer is an electrical device that can convert electricity of one voltage into another, making it safer to move along the wire. Some transformers will be removed from the utility pole as part of this undertaking.

[Slide 12]

And the last term I’ll define today is “feeders”. Feeders connect power stations with residences and businesses in different parts of the city. Basically, feeders bring the power into a neighborhood. To give you a better idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a map showing the proposed undergrounding route for Feeder 14093. I picked this feeder because it supplies the power to residents here at Casey Trees’ headquarters in Brookland, and also because Pepco identified it as one of the 21 worst performing feeders in the District. So for each of the 21 feeder areas that have been selected as part of the DC PLUG project, like this one, the primary power lines in that area will be buried.

[Slide 13]

Okay, now that you know the terminology, I’m going to show you what you can expect to see after the undergrounding takes place. Let’s imagine that when you look outside your window right now, this utility pole is what you see. It has primary power lines running along the top, and has three transformers attached to it. So the next slide will show you what will remain after the primary power lines are buried.

[Slide 14]



Did you catch the difference? Maybe we need to do that one more time.

[Slide 15]

So, again, here’s what you see if you look outside your window today.

[Slide 16]

And here’s what will remain after the primary power lines have been buried.

[Slide 17]

Burying only the primary power lines should help improve service reliability during bad weather. For nearly a decade, a series of severe weather events caused widespread and sustained power outages across the region affecting thousands of District residents. Many frustrated residents began calling for undergrounding power lines.

[Slide 18]

The tipping point came in 2012. Days after the 2012 Derecho, the D.C. Council held a hearing where residents and business owners called on the City to take action. This set up a chain of events, including the Mayor creating a taskforce to evaluate options for improving reliability during bad weather. After reviewing many recommendations, the D.C. Council eventually passed legislation that outlined the financing framework for burying the power lines. The legislation also required Pepco and DDOT to submit a proposal explaining the scope of the first three years of the project. That proposal is called the “Triennial Plan.”

[Slide 19]

Filed in June of this year, the Triennial Plan identifies the first 21 feeders that Pepco proposes burying during this project’s initial three years, and offered estimates of construction materials and costs, but it does not include important details like where, exactly, the right-of-way where the lines will be buried, or how many street trees might be affected by this project. If you want to view the Triennial Plan, the financing framework, or the recommendations made by the Mayor’s taskforce, I’ve included a link on this slide to the Office of the City Administrator’s DC PLUG website.

[Slide 20]

Nathan McElroy: Thank you, Suraj. Reliability is going to be one of the key



components, one of the main reasons why this project was introduced. Reliability is going to be improved on a day-to-day basis. Outages caused by car struck poles or animals getting entangled, and, of course, trees, are all going to be reduced, but the real, big benefit will be during major events, meaning hurricanes or Derecho-type events, where residents experienced outages that lasted two, three, four, even up to six and seven days due to the catastrophic damages. Those will be greatly reduced and outage restoration will be significantly improved.

And then some other more ancillary benefits that the District is going to experience are the economic benefits and, by that, one thing that comes to mind for me is the large amount of people that are working out of their homes, it’s going to be better for them. They’re not going to have to move when they have a significant outage, or move out of their home. It’s also going to attract business investment if the reliability improvements are there. And, of course, there are going to be jobs created by a billion dollar project. And the other benefit that Casey Trees is, obviously, very interested in is the forest canopy benefits. By not having the primary lines present, there’s a smaller utility envelope required, which is going to allow more green space. That interface between the gray and the green interface is going to benefit the green.

Maisie Hughes: Thank you, Nathan. John, do you want to dicuss tree preservation and vegetation management?

[Slide 21]

John Thomas: Yes. Currently, UFA works very closely with lots of different owners of properties or parcels throughout the District of Columbia. Urban forestry is one of the big owners or overseers of the public space or the right-of-way, which are the areas that are between sidewalk to sidewalk throughout the City. Other owners are people who have private property. We also have National Park Service and other federal entities, and then we have other large tract owners, like George Washington university or the IMF and World Bank – larger organizations like that.

And then, of course, Pepco is a player as well. Other utilities, they’re not land owners, necessarily, within those trees along the right-of-way and wires, but they’re obviously someone that has a vested interest in working in that area.

[Slide 22]

And then, UFA with its 20 certified ISA- certified arborists, work very closely with Pepco’s foresters and contractors and construction staff. We’ve made a huge push over the last ten years, very specifically over this last six or seven years, to



really drive home this following the industry standards that are coming out through the International Society of Arboriculture, and following all new academic research and how trees are reacting to pruning cuts and the best way to manage that process. We’re seeing great payback for that. The last few years, we’ve seen trees really respond well to following very strict industry guidelines.

And then going forward, we’re going to apply that same type of principles, where our foresters are working hand-in-hand with Pepco foresters every day of the week on every project. We will do the same thing through DC PLUG, where we’re already involved in the design process, or even one step further back, we’re involved in the walk-throughs that are talking about how and where all this may happen in the public space and, also, working with our two landscape architects that are on staff at UFA. They’re reviewing all the drawings, the standards and making sure that everything is as tree-friendly as possible. And then our arborists are ready to be there onsite when we have a problem with any construction, once it’s actually onsite and the work is happening and changes may need to be made due to other utilities or a lot of times when you dig, you find things that you didn’t know that were there and it alters the plan a little bit. So we’ll be ready there to move forward.

And as we go on, our arborists and our landscape architects will continue to play that role, where they’ll be involved in every phase of this, with the ultimate goal of trying to find the best place to position the underground utilities, in and around our trees, that our trees have the best chance to succeed and be here for generations to come.

[Slide 23]

Maisie Hughes: Casey Trees has already submitted public comments on this project. We have four main points. We would, of course, prefer if all of the overhead lines were underground, but we understand that the difference between burying all of the lines underground and just burying the primary lines is the difference between one billion dollars versus five billion dollars. But we also feel that pruning for secondary lines is far less aggressive than the pruning that has to happen for primary lines, so we think this is good news for street trees.

[Slide 24]

We also, in our comments, suggested that since we’re going to have the poles in the ground after the project is over, that if you move the secondary lines higher up on the poles, it would leave an opportunity for trees to grow even larger. We also recommended that all of the lines that are going to be buried, if they could be buried in the center of the roadway, as far away from the tree box as possible. And we wanted to encourage the City to determine the precise number of trees



potentially impacted by this project, and to develop a plan for the rapid replacement of any trees lost or damaged during the construction of this project.

Lets quickly review the distinction between pruning for primary power lines and for secondary power lines.

[Slide 25]

This slide shows best practices for pruning around power lines. There are three main types of pruning cuts that you will see around primary power lines. So on the left you see a lovely, round, beautiful tree before a “V”-shaped pruning, and then, on the right of the slide, you can see what you may typically see in Washington, D.C., after an aggressive pruning around primary power lines.

Likewise, you can see what would happen in a side pruning or after an “L”-shaped pruning. What brings this distinction home even harder, in order to prune for primary power lines, you have to have ten feet of clearance, so that means, oftentimes, you will have to remove an entire branch of a tree in order to follow best practices for pruning around primary power lines.

[Slide 26]

This is not the case for pruning for secondary power lines. To prune for secondary power lines, the ISA recommends only a two-foot clearance from secondary power lines. That means you get a much fuller canopy and the tree is much more aesthetically pleasing.

[Slide 27]

Emily Oaksford: So, while burying the primary power lines is welcome news for the long-term health and appearance of our street trees, the project’s full impact on our neighborhoods can’t really be determined until more details are released. Since DDOT has the jurisdiction over all land within the public right-of-way, that means that they have the ability to bury the lines under either the roadway, (where vehicular lanes are), in parking lanes and bike lanes, or even in the sidewalk amenity zone (which oftentimes includes benches, street trees, and tree boxes). Right now, the lines could be buried anywhere within that right-of-way, because it’s not specified.

[Slide 28]

Scott Placide: Thank you, Emily. Currently Pepco and DDOT are at a very high level in planning for the DC PLUG project Right now, a lot of our plans basically mirror the underground paths of the feeders to mirror the existing overhead



wires. There are many considerations that we need to make in order to engineer the best possible route for these feeders. One consideration that we make is the placing of transformer and electrical equipment vaults. This equipment requires safe operation and access by our utility crews, and the best location for these facilities is, typically, behind the curb where crews, during access, will have protection from vehicular traffic and, also, the equipment can be safe and avoid exposure to the chemicals and salt that are used to treat roads during the winter season.

Additionally, as we get down in this iterative design process to a detailed design level, we’ll be conducting topographical and sub-surface utility field surveys to determine the best location for our underground utilities. There are currently a lot of other utilities that have underground facilities within the public right-of-way, and Pepco’s underground power lines need to maintain certain distances and clearances from the existing utilities for insulation.

[Slide 29]

Emily Oaksford: So because of what Scott just mentioned, there is some push to bury the lines and transformers under the sidewalk. But this is a concern to us, because any undergrounding within or adjacent to the sidewalk amenity zone could be detrimental to our street trees. And that’s because any intense construction in and around a tree’s critical root zone can fatally injury mature trees. We also want to point out that there may be additional costs associated with burying lines under the sidewalk area, because of repaving concrete and the reinstallation of, say, benches, bike racks and street lamps, that may end up becoming more costly than just repaving asphalt (the pavement generally used for a roadway.

[Slide 30]

So, to determine the amount and how many street trees might be potentially in harm’s way, we mapped out where those 163 miles of feeder lines that are proposed to be buried in the District, based on the three-year Plan. Along those 163 miles of feeder lines, there lie 17,000 street trees. And since primary lines are located, usually, just on one side of the roadway, we estimate that as many as 8,700 street trees could be affected during construction.

[Slide 31]

To see what that really means on the ground level, we did an up-close analysis in Ward 7’s Hillcrest neighborhood. The pink highlighted streets indicate where the feeder routes will be buried. We can see all the street trees that are within the feeder route impact zone. So, within this one neighborhood (Hillcrest), 430 trees



could be impacted. That’s just on one side of the street. We know that 400 trees in one neighborhood, a loss like that could be devastating to neighborhood character, property values, and even sense of place.

[Slide 32]

So, Scott described to everyone what we’re up against. There are a lot of existing utilities and underground pipes and wires under our streets right now. We realize that there are going to be potential conflicts. But, we here at Casey Trees in our public comments, we want to see a plan that prioritizes undergrounding primary lines under the roadway so that, whenever possible, and as a standard, construction disturbance happens far from the roots of street trees. We think this will provide the best chance to preserve that beauty of historic, tree-lined streets.

[Slide 33]

We also would hope that the City could enhance the DC PLUG Plan. We would like the Plan to include more information that would specify where the wires are going to be located in that right-of-way and how many trees are going to be impacted.

We also want to see the Plan include a plan for replanting trees where they must be removed and an appropriate tree-protection plan for during construction, when trees that can be preserved can be properly protected.

[Slide 34]

Maisie Hughes: To summarize Casey Trees’ position, we want, as a matter of practice, for the power lines to be undergrounded in the roadway. We want Pepco and UFA to determine the number of trees potentially impacted once they have more information about what’s going on underground. And, we want them to commit to developing a plan for rapid replacement of trees.

[Slide 35]

We learned today that the Public Service Commission voted on November 6th to approve the Plan, as is, with some minor amendments. Today, the Public Service Commission will have on their website all of the results of that vote, so you can check that out by going to this link here to the Public Service Commission to find out more about the amendment that they want made for the plan. But you could also contact D.C.’s Office of People’s Counsel. That office is here to really advocate for what citizens want. And, of course, you can always check out Casey Trees’ public comments on our public comments page or give

http://caseytrees.org/programs/policyadvocacy/comments/

http://www.opc-dc.gov/index.php/consumer-topics-a-z/dc-undergrounding-updates

http://www.dcpsc.org/esr/Pepco_DDOT_ApplicationApproval_FC1116.asp

http://www.dcpsc.org/esr/Pepco_DDOT_ApplicationApproval_FC1116.asp



us a call if you have any other questions.

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