NB Power's underfunding of tree-trimming led to outages: report

NB Power says a newly released report that details significant tree-trimming shortcomings over several years along the province's major transmission corridors does not mean similar problems existed within the electrical network serving home owners.

​"It is understandable that some might confuse the two," said NB Power spokeswoman Deborah Nobes in an email to CBC News.

“At NB Power, transmission vegetation management programs are run entirely separate from our distribution tree-trimming programs."

Last week, New Brunswick's Energy and Utilities Board published details of a "non-public investigation" that was triggered in 2010 when two separate transmission lines shorted out within nine days of one another during sunny July afternoons.

The report shows how brush clearing along NB Power's main transmission corridors had become so underfunded and disorganized by 2010, trees began reaching power lines and shorting them out.

Eventually the utility's transmission company, Transco, was disciplined by the New Brunswick System Operator for violating international reliability standards and in a settlement agreement ordered to hire more people and buy more equipment.

The report appears to contradict assurances given by NB Power last year that its tree-trimming programs had not been subject to budget cuts over the years and could not be blamed for contributing to an unprecedented series of power outages in the province in 2013 and 2014.

Over those two years, N.B. customers suffered a total of 21 million hours without electricity, more than the previous 10 years combined.

Many of the outages were caused by trees encroaching on power lines and although NB Power has subsequently increased its tree-trimming budgets, it has resisted suggestions that inadequate tree trimming in previous years made outages worse than they needed to be.

"I just want to assure New Brunswickers that we've had a substantial tree-trimming program throughout the last few years. There's been no decrease,"  NB Power's Brent Staeban said in late 2013, as homeowners dealt with lengthy Christmas and New Years outages.

Problems escalated in 2005

However, in the 2012 investigative report into transmission outages caused by trees and released just last week by the Energy and Utility's Board, a significant list of problems with budget cuts and poor management beginning in 1990 and accelerating in 2005 are highlighted.

"An assessment of NB Power’s vegetation management program identified a number of factors that contributed to the vegetation contacts [in 2010]," says an account of the investigation written by the Energy and Utilities Board.

"These included a backlog of uninspected and untreated right-of-ways due to cutbacks in herbicide application, cutbacks in staff, restrictions on cutting in greenbelts, inherent limitations of air and ground patrols, lack of up to date as-built information, out of date species and growth data, lack of documented clearing standards, multiple computer systems and disjointed data bases used to manage the program, and lack of a trending analysis and incident investigation process."

The report says the cancellation of herbicide spraying by NB Power in 1990 began a long slow process of tree growth in transmission corridors that was made worse in 2005 when NB Power eliminated one of two ground patrol crews responsible for checking for problems. That reduced actual visual inspections of trees threatening the 6,700 kilometres of transmission lines from the ground from once every four years to once every eight years.

 NB Power Transmission also eliminated the position of "Vegetation Manager" which the report said "reduced the program's capacity and profile in competing with other programs for company resources."

On top of those cutbacks the program suffered serious operational problems, including a lack of training among employees, a misunderstanding of the growth rates of certain species of trees and the use of multiple computer systems to manage tree cutting that were unable to communicate with one another.

Management system tools such as goal setting, trending, reporting, incident investigation, system and process auditing and continual improvement have not been fully implemented.- Energy and Utilities Board report

"Management system tools such as goal setting, trending, reporting, incident investigation, system and process auditing and continual improvement have not been fully implemented," said the report.

NB Power was made to spend $1.8 million to fix deficiencies outlined in the report, including hiring more people and buying more equipment for the tree cutting program.

Nobes says those fixes were completed some time ago and insists NB Power's distribution system shared none of the same shortcomings and budget cuts in its tree-cutting program that were uncovered in the transmission program.

"Immediately following these incidents, NB Power embarked on a four-year plan to enhance reliability with an investment of $1.8 million in improvements. We have continued to build on these improvements on the transmission side in the years since, and have been very public about our work to enhance tree trimming and vegetation management practices on the distribution side as well."