Tree damage, cable lines take days to clean up in North Buffalo community

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) – A tree comes crashing down in a North Buffalo neighborhood, but it takes days for anyone to show up to clean it up, or to clean up the damage it caused.

Imagine coming home and finding in your backyard a tree that came crashing down with wires all over the place. This is what residents found on Saturday.

So they contacted Call 4 Action.

Charlotte Hall who lives in an apartment building in North Buffalo says she was out and about and found the mess when she got home. She didn’t know whether the lines across the parking lot were cable lines, telephone lines or something else.

National Grid came out and learned they were in fact cable lines and that they belonged to Spectrum Cable. Call 4 Action contacted National Grid and they told us it wasn’t their responsibility to clean up these lines — it would fall on Charter Communications, Spectrum’s parent company.

Call 4 Action contacted Charter Communications as well, they told us that they never got an initial complaint over the weekend and credited News 4 for alerting them about the problem. Spectrum sent out a technician to this area on Wednesday.

“And, I knew that if I called Call 4 Action, someone would hear me,” Hall said. “My biggest concern was that I myself didn’t get hurt or somebody else get hurt.”

For nearly five days, Charlotte says she was making calls to numerous utilities and providers to find out what was going on and what the cleanup process would be. Then, she contacted Call 4 Action and we got involved immediately. It was within a couple hours that a technician got sent out to the property. The technician was able to run new cable lines from a home to a utility pole so that cable in the area can be restored.

Cleaning up the tree is going to fall on the property owner. A city spokesperson tells us it will likely not fall on the city because it is private property.

Jeff Preval is an award-winning anchor and reporter who joined the News 4 team in December 2021. See more of his work here .