A tree cutter tried to push a tree off a live wire

Two utilities spent the week fighting regulators over how much tree-clearing money they get after storms knocked out power. A crew owner in Michigan's Upper Peninsula died trying to lift a felled tree off an energized line. And emerald ash borer crossed into Washington State for the first time.

The big one

When the lights go out after a storm, the fight over line-clearance budgets follows fast. Two of them landed this week.

Kentucky Power asked the Kentucky Public Service Commission to reconsider a February order that cut $11 million from its yearly vegetation-management budget. The utility told regulators the August outages were worse because of that cut, and that restoring the money would let it remove more trees outside its rights-of-way without raising what customers pay annually (WEKU).

In Indiana, the state's Office of Utility Consumer Counselor asked the state to investigate NIPSCO after its own storm outages. The petition says NIPSCO was authorized to spend more than $77 million on vegetation management from 2023 to 2025, on top of more than $2 billion on infrastructure since 2016 (WFYI). A separate lawsuit alleges NIPSCO didn't inspect lines and poles, identify hazard trees, answer complaints about encroaching vegetation, or keep enough qualified workers to clear rights-of-way (Chicago Crusader).

Here's the plain read. That $11 million and that $77 million are your paychecks. When a commission trims a VM budget, the first thing a utility cuts is contract crews and off-right-of-way removals, and the first thing you hear about it is the outage report a season later. The Kentucky filing spells the math out in one line: fewer dollars, fewer trees down before they fall on a line. A Capehart legal note this week also flagged a court ruling that a utility's duty to maintain trees near power lines is about electrical reliability, not protecting passing motorists from tree hazards (Capehart). The scope of the job is drawn by what the utility is legally on the hook for, and it stops at the wire.

The canopy

Another arbor-care shop gets rolled into a landscaper

HighGrove Partners, the Atlanta commercial landscaper backed by Agellus Capital, bought O&A Landscaping of Greater Orlando on August 25. O&A was founded in 2006 by Carl Osborn and Rob Allis and does arbor care alongside maintenance and irrigation across Central Florida (Yahoo Finance). Same pattern we keep logging: private-equity money buying tree work as a line item inside bigger landscaping platforms.

Private equity buys a railroad brush contractor

Secovia Capital acquired Ferrovia, which clears and chemically treats brush, trees and weeds along railroad rights-of-way, from Genesis Rail Company on August 25 (PE Professional). Rail corridor vegetation work overlaps with utility line clearance, and the money is circling that niche the same way it's circling residential tree care.

Bob Rouse gets ISA honorary membership

TCIA's Bob Rouse was named the 2026 recipient of the ISA Honorary Membership Award, handed out at the ISA Annual International Conference in Detroit August 10 through 12 (TCIA Magazine).

Safety report

Jayson Dutiel, 50, owner of A Cut Above Tree and Lawn Care in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, was killed on August 20 at a home in Forsyth Township, Marquette County. He had felled a tree that landed on a power line. Another worker then lifted him with a skid steer so he could try to push the tree off the energized line, and he was electrocuted at the scene (MLive). MIOSHA logged it as the state's 32nd worker death of 2026 and the first workplace fatality of the year in the U.P., and opened an inspection dated August 26 (Iron Mountain Daily News). A tree on a line is a live tree. There's no version of pushing it off by hand that ends well.

In Adams County, Mississippi, Victor Martinez, 66, was working with a tree-clearing crew on August 28 near Upper Kingston Road when a large overhead limb broke loose, hit him in the head, and knocked him onto a stump. Sheriff Travis Patten said Martinez took severe lacerations and was airlifted to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge (WJTV via Yahoo).

Near Oregon City, Clackamas County deputies and SWAT responded to a man shooting at a tree crew close to Highway 99 and South End Road, closing roads while they dealt with the suspect. No worker injuries were reported (KATU).

The Apple Valley, Minnesota grapple case we covered last week now has a court date. Christopher Boone Crimmins, charged with second-degree manslaughter in the death of coworker Tyler Lynch, is due back in court September 10 (DotDotNews).

Pest and disease watch

EAB reaches Washington State

Two people in Vancouver spotted an emerald ash borer on their windshield on August 3 and reported it. The Washington State Department of Agriculture confirmed it as the state's first EAB detection and adopted a firewood quarantine, and is telling people not to plant new ash (Camas-Washougal Post-Record). The beetle also turned up in central North Dakota for the first time, found by Bismarck city forestry crews removing declining ash, which puts Burleigh County under quarantine (Dakota News Network). And it hit Hayward, Wisconsin, the seventh town in Sawyer County to confirm it, where a Wisconsin DNR specialist figures it's been present four or five years and could kill about 99% of the city's ash (Civic Media). Minnesota, now at 60 infested counties, has released about 8,000 parasitoid wasps at Ki-Chi-Saga Park to slow it (FOX 9).

Spotted lanternfly lands in New Hampshire

The New Hampshire Department of Agriculture, Markets and Food confirmed the state's first field detection of spotted lanternfly, a small number of insects found in Salem. There's no evidence yet of an established population, but crews are surveying and asking people to report sightings at NHBugs.org (NHPR).

Species spotlight

Kousa dogwood (Cornus kousa) is the Asian dogwood that blooms weeks after native flowering dogwood, holding pointed creamy bracts above the leaves and dropping raspberry-like edible fruit. It tops out around 20 to 30 feet, grows slowly, and handles zones 5 through 8 in moist, rich, acidic, well-drained soil. It takes drought better than flowering dogwood and, more to the point, shrugs off the anthracnose and borers that wreck Cornus florida. Powdery mildew is the main headache.

On a job it's light rigging on a small frame, but the wood itself is hard, dense and fine-grained like all dogwood. Prune after flowering in early summer, and it barely needs any. Leave the mottled exfoliating bark on the older trunks alone. That peeling bark is the best ID feature and half the reason it's in the yard.

One for the lunch break

A Florida homeowner became convinced the tree in his yard was creeping toward his house. Rather than let it eat at him, he rigged a homemade string test and documented over time that the trunk line really was shifting toward the structure (Upworthy). Every arborist reading this knows what a leaning, root-lifting tree looks like. Give the man credit for building his own dendrometer out of string before calling anybody.

Stay safe out there,

The TreeNerd crew

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