Woodsman416's "Working on the woodpile" reminded me of a logging incident that happened quite a few years ago on a woodlot my Uncle and I were cutting. It was ours, but 20 miles from home. For anyone who has been to Maine and been to Belfast, Maine heading towards Acadia you have been by the spot. Its just off Route 1 just at the end of the bridge located behind Reny's Plaza. Not a big lot, only 42 acres, but there was some pines there. There is also a substation that feeds Belfast. Well my Uncle went to fell a tree pretty close to Route One (Maine's second busiest roadway) but it went backwards pinching his saw. So he fire up the John Deere 1010 we had at the time and pushed it off the stump. Well it broke the hinge and went backwards anyway, across the power lines and right into the road. Sparks were flying, people were slamming on their brakes and so we just hooked onto the tree and dragged it out of the road the best we could. I asked my Uncle if he wanted me to go call Central Maine Power (CMP) to tell them about what we did and he said no, they would be along shortly. He was correct in that. The branch office is just across the Bridge and they were not long in getting there, that was because since we were only a pole up from the substation, we put the entire city of Belfast without power. Oh yeah, closed the school, hospital had to go on emergency power, county 911 dispatching center had to go on emergency power...it was not good. So these white shirts came up to us just screaming as we are nonchalantly limbing out our pine and bucking it into logs, and the whole time these white shirts are screaming at my Uncle, yet he was not saying a word. They are like, "Do you know how much this is going to cost you. Do you have any idea?" and my Uncle finally just pointed to the substation. "Do you see that rock wall there? Did it ever occur to you guys that it might have been the property line when you bulldozed it last year and added on to your substation? I have no idea how much its going to cost me to fix these power lines but I do know you are going to pay far more for our land." The white shirt sat back a second and just said, "Well Mr. LodgedTree, we all make mistakes now don't we." We never got a bill!
ya gotta be county folks to manage to do that without getting lawyers involved! congrats to your uncle and white shirts for figuring it out!
Maybe. CMP workers are the highest paying workers in the state, but I have had a lot of run ins with them. I dropped a tree one time here at the farm and it tipped backwards and into the powerlines. It cracked and popped so I waited a few seconds for the limb chopper to come through and sure enough ten seconds later..."boom"...so I knew if the limb chopper did not work, the circuit breaker had tripped and power was out for awhile. So I hooked onto the tree with my tractor and pulled it off the lines. They were swaying and whipping around, but did not break luckily. Sure enough the CMP guy drives slowly by an hour later, so here I am driving my tractor pulling wood and I just wave and he never puts two and two together that I was probably the logger that tipped the tree into the line. He flipped the breaker and all was well in the world again.
There was another time where we had a powerful gale blow through and tipped all these trees on the line. Power was out and would be for awhile, but I happened to have a skidder on the farm that year so this old duffer came over to my house and suggested we help CMP out. There was no power anyway, so we started on the last house on the line and as you guys know, a skidder can go anywhere, so I would just use the blade and push the trees off the line...no chainsaw needed. We had done quite a few dozen trees and half way to town when this CMP Supervisor came driving up to us and was she ever mad. She started screaming and yelling, but around here 80 year old duffers do not tend to like being yelled at, much less of that gender because things were different in that day. We all knew what the scoop was. CMP makes a boatload of money on storms and hated the fact that we were killing their overtime. We were not about to stop, but later a Sheriff's deputy told we had to so we did, but it was pretty silly, here we were doing our civic duty to God and country and they wanted to fleece us for overtime. Its a shame that Maine has THE highest electric rates in the country!
