Dear Madam,
I appreciate Lucas Adcock’s public service article about the perils of trying to cut up downed trees leaning on power lines – it’s quite dangerous. If the tree is wet, electricity can be conducted down the trunk, through the unsuspecting moron touching the trunk, and into the “ground.” The “ground” in this case, being, well – the ground. I’m familiar with this scenario as it once happened to me.
The salient thought I had before trying to push the tree off the power line so I could cut it up was that wood doesn’t conduct electricity. That is a scientific fact – but so is the fact that water is an excellent conductor of electricity, and electricity, being the menacing opportunist that it is, bypassed the wood and went straight into the rainwater that coated the entire trunk of that tree and on into me. I don’t know how many brain cells I lost that day, but some of my more radical ideas vanished into the ozone.
The picture accompanying Adcock’s article, however, is of a tree leaning on a data line, a data line no data ever goes through nor do I believe ever will, so the lines are harmless and just for show. Frontier puts them up as part of the multi-billion-dollar scam of bringing high speed internet to us rubes here in Pocahontas County. The latest iteration of this scam are Fiber Optic lines, the line that is being used as a sawhorse in Adcock’s picture. The old lines were getting worn out from all the trees leaning on them, and since Frontier never cleans them off, they needed replacing.
Once, a while back, my wife and I noticed a tree leaning on some data lines on State Route 92 on the way south to White Sulphur Springs, and then we watched the same tree leaning on the same data lines for the next two years. When they came through with the Fiber Optics cables here lately to replace the old lines, I believe they moved that tree off the old lines long enough to string the new cables and then put the tree back on.
My wife and I, trying to be good citizens, called Frontier when we first noticed the tree on their lines, and, after a long wait, with a lot of clicks as the call was routed around the world to the Punjab region in India, a guy came on the line jabbering in Punjabi that roughly translated into “Get lost – not my problem!”
Or at least I think that was what he said.
John Jackson
Huntersville
