On August 12th, Enel Distribución held the Webinar entitled “Urban Tree Management and Infrastructure,” offering its experience on managing vegetation and its interaction with the power lines, with a focus on mitigating the impact on service continuity during the winter. It also shared its experience in the implementation of the urban tree management pilot project, which started in 2019.
In this regard, the CEO of Enel Distribución, Ramón Castañeda, explained that “the new climate conditions we have seen in the city during recent years, where a decade-long drought has been combined with extreme situations, such as intense winds and even lightning storms and snow never before seen in the central zone, have caused limbs and even entire trees to fall on the electrical lines, interrupting the service we provide to our customers.”
“It is essential for the company to participate in, foster and contribute to finding solutions to the challenge of promoting tree care in the city in order to also minimize the potential impact on the electricity service. For this reason, in 2019 in coordination with the city governments in our concessions area, we began a pilot project to manage urban trees and our distribution network. This project has shown that thanks to the collaborative work between the private sector, city authorities and residents, we can develop initiatives that contribute to the community, in this particular case, improving the compatibility of trees and power lines,” he says.
The urban tree management pilot project is an innovative and pioneering initiative that began in 2019. The first activity was carried out thanks to the collaborative work with the city government and residents of Quinta Normal, with the objective of replacing trees of the commune with exotic species, to improve the tree's compatibility with the power lines and avoid risks to the community.
The key principle of this project is to harmonize the presence of city trees with power line security. To do so, it considers a risk assessment of trees in a given sector, carried out through a technical inspection of each tree by a team of experts.