New year’s resolution: Stop picking on poor little NStar. Only a joke, of course, but you can get to thinking that way.
In recent months there has been widespread griping about the power company’s performance in two big storms. Maybe, people have begun to think, the problem of trees falling on wires causing great inconvenience to customers has something to do with the lack of pre-emptive pruning. If NStar can’t put the wires underground, at least they should make the above ground wires less vulnerable to the forests they run through.
But another big story has been widespread lamentation about NStar’s excessive, inconsiderate pruning around wires, ruining homeowners’ privacy and their view of beloved trees.
There may be some who are shaking their heads in sympathy for the beleagured public utility: damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
Then there ‘s the ongoing spraying issue. Seems like everyone who has an opinion on this is on NStar’s case. Letters to the editor and signs draped over bridges implore: Please, NStar, don’t spray, don’t poison our groundwater.
The outcry has been general against the wrongheadedness of deliberately dumping chemicals into sandy soil not many feet beneath the surface of which is the underground lake which is the water supply for most of us . Not when there are perfectly reasonable, non invasive alternatives—such as, in fact, pruning the power lines right-of-way, the method they used for decades before the bright idea of poisoning inexplicably jumped into their heads. (The chemicals are so safe, you claim, you NStar execs put them on your breakfast cereal? Yeah, well, we’ve heard that before.)
The anti-spraying sentiment has resulted in a moratorium but it expired on January 1 with no reassurances that the company’s heart has softened on the issue.
One would think this to be a no-brainer for the company, a simple matter of ecologic and maintaining cordial relations with those they purport to serve. But wait, maybe not so simple. There was an article in the paper back in September about the National Seashore planning to do its own spraying, of our ponds, no less, “ to poison invasive reeds.” I’ve always thought that limpid above -ground water had an intimate connection with our underground water supply.
How can this be? How can we go on picking on NStar for p oisoning the water beneath us when CCNS is doing it? Don’t we have a serious credibility and consistency problem here? Do we need to get Seashore superintendent Price to relent on his spraying plan or give up the fight against NStar’s?
Lest we lose our way in this moral thicket, and start feeling sorry for the utility, let us consider: There’s really no problem. Not when we remember that both entities, the utility and the national park, are p ublic. Trace back the line of authority for both and it ends with We the People. We decided that we would authorize one entity to handle the creation and delivery of electricity and another to manage our public open space for preservation and recreation.
So damn right it should be part of NStar’s job description to prune to make it less likely that we the people will lose power. But that doesn’t give them carte blanche to do it any way they want. They are a public utility and as such should always do what they do in cooperation with those most affected. Their job, truly, is to please us, the public in “public utility.” The customer is always right.
When it comes to the spraying: it’s not really a contradiction if the people both want their National Park to spray and their public utility not to spray when old- fashioned cutting and pruning will do. If we who use the ponds and drink the water decide that a weed-free pond—or even, however foolishly in the view of many, a bright green lawn– is more important than a poison- free aquifer—actually, it’s hard to imagine we do– that doesn’t excuse NStar. It’s not NStar’s call to make. Two wrongs don’t make a right, one’s mother always said.
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