Tropicals & Tender Perennials: I really need to know the answers to this question., 1 by lovelyiris

lovelyiris wrote:
Oh my Jermy, your so lucky that tree didn't do more damage to your place. Thank goodness it spared your home and car.

You are so very right to document everything and keep excellent records of conversations, complaints and so forth regarding the tree. I had a incident that was the nightmare from you know where regarding a tree and the electric company.

We had a pine tree on our property line that was surrounded on all sides with electrical and phone lines. So you can get an ideal it was a triangle of wires and the tree was right in the middle. This tree started doing the same thing, dropping limbs and dying. The limbs were in the electric lines on all sides so no one I could hire would touch cutting it down. You always hear the electric company say don't go near the wires call them. Ha Ha, after three years of calling and complaining and them coming out several times the tree finally fell during a hard wind. Mine and the neighbors kids were playing football about 15 ft from where it landed. It could have killed one of them had they not run away. It completely demolished my daughters car cutting it in half. It jerked all the electrical lines off the poll and off our house. The live wires were out there jumping all over the place and all the plugs in the house were smoking and blew everything that was plugged into the up. Best part is yet to come. The fire department come out, they call the electric company and they shut the main power to our house off and fix it to where we can't have electricity until we have at our expense a electrician our and have all the wiring re-done.

The electric company said that it was "An Act of God" and they would not be responsible for anything. Needless to say I was fit to be tied. I told them I was going to the electric company and get copies of all my complaints and that it was not an act of God it was they were too lazy to cut it down. I drove to their office later that day and wouldn't you know it. They had no records of me calling and complaining. Of course that just added fuel to the fire and I told them that they had not heard the last from me. I kept calling them and talking to different people higher up with the company and got the run around each time and was told they were trying to work on it. LOL

After a couple of months of nothing being done I wrote an article to the newspaper and it took up one entire page. I wrote everything down that had happened for the past couple of years and their response each time. Then I started listing the names of the people that I had talked to and the one's that had come out and looked at the tree but didn't cut it down and so forth. I guess that's one of the perks of living in a small rural town. Everyone knows everyone by name. With all the information I had provided in the paper and all the calls I made to them, the public was as furious with them as I was when they found out the Electric Company was calling it an act of God.

Bottom line is within a week of my letter to the Editor we were reinbursed for just about everything.
So my advice to anyone is just like you said document EVERYTHING between you and the city, county, or electric company when it comes to stuff like this. Take pictures too when you can. Keep all those records in a safe place and don't get rid of them until the problem is removed or resolved.

I'm going to take the Big John Deere tractor and go to the back of the farm and see if I can locate me another old tree to drag up closer to the house for my broms. I have several different sizes of those bits to drill the holes in a tree or anything else. I have one about the size of the hole you drill for door knobs and one a little bigger than that. I could actually put some of those smalls pots in the larger size I have. Now that's another ideal and I could plant some stuff besides broms. Maybe a couple of different ferns and things. I'll take photos when I do it.
Now instead of kicking myself I'll start dreaming about how beautiful my tree is going to be this summer. (grin)