A growing problem brings power outages

Power outages are rites of spring around here, but this time, even Peco was in the dark.

There was no thunder, no high winds, no lightning, no car smashing into a utility pole. Yet somehow, six Delaware County homes had lost power.

Peco was mystified, until an investigation revealed a surprising, and creepy, answer: Call it vege-terrorism.

A renegade vine had crept up a utility pole - a good 35 feet straight up - worked its way onto a power line, and tripped the wire. That interrupted the current that keeps on the lights and the TVs in a Llanerch neighborhood in Upper Darby Township.

That was on May 7, and, overall, more than 1,000 Peco customers have lost power in the last few months because of aggressively growing vines that have shrouded tree trunks, poles, fences, rocks, and anything else in the paths of their insidious tendrils.

The outages are symptoms of what evidently has been a breakout year for the region's vegetation.

The harvest of growth - and it's not just the vines - is the product of a near-perfect recipe concocted by nature: generous and consistent rains mixed with gently warmed soil.

And with no extreme heat or drought in the picture, horticultural experts see no end to this almost shockingly pleasant emerald summer.

That's not necessarily good news to the utility people who are subject to stiff federal fines if they fail to keep all vines, tree branches, all green stuff, away from wires. That is the legacy of the historic Northeast power outages of 2003, blamed on faulty tree-trimming in Ohio.

"We're seeing a lot more tree growth, a lot more vine growth," said Frank Moffa, Peco's vegetation manager. "Everything is growing about as fast as it ever does in Pennsylvania."

"There's definitely a change in what we've seen," agreed Richard S. Wolowicz, Moffa's counterpart at Public Service Gas & Electric of New Jersey. Wolowicz says that to his amazement, some tree species have added 6 feet of growth this year. "That's really quite astounding," he said.

PSE&G has had only one or two vine-related outages, Wolowicz said, but he's aware that could change. "We're going to be watching," he said. "I would imagine we're going to see a vine issue creeping up."

Vines can spread a few inches a day, 20 to 30 feet a year, experts say, so they can easily reach from ground to power-line level in less than two years. Even so, in a normal year Peco might have only a handful of vine outages, said spokesman Mike Wood, but this year obviously is different.

In Pennsylvania, Peco's prime vine areas are in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties, Moffa said. Yesterday, along an otherwise green-challenged industrial stretch of busy Hector Street in Whitemarsh Township, Montgomery County, a phalanx of vines was strangling a rusting chain-link fence and taking aim at the power lines atop an adjacent utility pole.

Early in the morning, Ryan Swier, a supervisor for Asplundh Tree Expert Co., a Peco contractor, arrived with a crew to cut the vines and apply an herbicide, Garlon. Horticulture is not his forte, he acknowledged, so although he could not identify the various species, he knew that they were green, that they were climbing, and that they must die.

If all goes well, he said, the severed vines should experience their own brownout in a couple of weeks and be reduced to dead, spindly sticks.

Wood said that three of the main local vine menaces are poison ivy, the same producer of the urushiol that makes you itch in places you didn't know you had; wild grape, with the thick, woody stems strong enough to hold the average Tarzan; and bittersweet, an Asian import that grows rapidly.

Wild grape and poison ivy were evident at the Hector Street site, and it's not unusual for rival vines to share quality time, said Scott Guiser, senior educator at the Bucks County Agricultural Extension. They might prey on and strangle everything else, but "they coexist nicely," he said.

As for why Peco can't keep the creepers from creeping, the utility pleads sheer ubiquity. Stephanie Cohen, a horticulturist and longtime instructor at Temple University's Ambler campus, is sympathetic.

Vines take off when they're planted, and even when they're not planted. "It's not an easy problem," she said. "They're harder than hell to get rid of."

Evidently, that's especially true in this emerald summer.

Said Paul Meyer, director of Philadelphia's Morris Arboretum: "It's a great year for anything growing."