I had a realization earlier today. If you look up historical paintings, drawings and photos of Ann Arbor a few years after it was founded, you'll see that there were almost no trees in sight. Because of logging that occurred across the entire nation at the time, forests were almost entirely cleared out, including Ann Arbor. When Ann Arbor electrified almost 100 years ago, there weren't many trees, and the trees there were probably weren't particularly large. Now, Ann Arbor is sometimes called tree town. After all these years trees naturally started growing in, and many were introduced into neighborhoods. On top of that, in surrounding areas forests have even started returning to their former strength along with the wildlife that used to occupy those spaces.

Along with all the tree growth, weather has become more extreme, and it's clear weather will unfortunately continue to get more extreme as the globe warms.

So you have trees and forests growing larger every year, and weather becoming more extreme. Growth is trending up, extreme weather is trending up. Thinking you can trim back enough trees is paddling up stream at this point. The problem is clearly not going to go away on it's own. There is a point where above ground powerlines in this area will simply not be sustainable. And I think we're crossing that line pretty quickly here, especially given the recent outage.

The biggest question is what DTE is willing to do. And if they keep providing the status quo or below, I don't think we have any choice but to find an alternative so we can live with some baseline reliability with our utilities.

The people working for DTE and other contractors in the street right now are doing incredible work. But if we buried most of our powerlines, most of them wouldn't need to be out there right now. It seems like DTE leadership, so far, isn't willing to update their infrastructure where it's needed.

Edit:

Some things worth mentioning that were shared with me.