COBB— District 5 Supervisor, Jessica Pyska, invited Pacific Gas and Electric company (PG&E) to the September Cobb Area Council board meeting Thursday to address the issue of hazardous trees all over Cobb and to speak about tree mortality issues.
“We declared a local emergency in May and last winter when PG&E started to do their tree work, they said they were not going to be hauling away the trees, so they were going to just chip the ranches and leave the trees. Back then, they had identified 600 trees in the Cobb area. We couldn’t leave them on the ground, so, we got into it,” she said on Thursday during the hybrid-style meeting. “Eventually, they decided to haul the trees, but now they came to me in August and said, ‘we’ve hauled 3600 trees; we’re out of money and we’re done.’ That’s not acceptable, because we still have hundreds, maybe thousands of trees around. Cutting trees down and leaving them in people’s yards and next to people’s homes is not going to make our community any safer and, arguably, it’s more hazardous.”
Pyska said that every day she gets emails about people having trees that have been left in their yards. “Just keep those emails coming and I will keep forwarding them. However, they (PG&E) did start a brand new phone line for wood removal. The PG&E number to call if you have trees that need to be removed is 800-564-5080, but you can also email them at treesafety@pge.com. I will just keep pushing them through because what they’re trying to do is unacceptable. They actually get reimbursed by hauling these trees off, so the fact that they say they’re out of money is irrelevant.”
Pyska also said she has been trying to shorten that window, because they have two contractors: One contractor falls the tree and the other contractor comes and gets the wood and, sometimes, there are weeks and months in between. “That’s not acceptable, especially during fire season.”
She added she had had a meeting with Senator Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) the previous night. “We talked about all these things. He’s going to be setting up a meeting with their regional vice president in the very near future. This is the third meeting I’ve had with him in the past several months, all about trees. We have such a widespread tree mortality problem that it’s larger than one agency can handle.”
According to one of the members of the Cobb Firewise Community, Glenneth Lambert, “They’re doing a major amount of work. It’s like living in an industrial zone. They’re chopping down a lot of trees. They’re already digging trenches for the bearing of the electric line. There’s a lot of work going on. They start early and it’s quite a thing to live in right now. There’s a lot of trucks, a lot of activity.”
The Forest Health Committee has been working on a comprehensive list of priority projects in the Cobb area for the development of the community and wildfire defense grants.
