Meet the voracious insect that’s killing trees and causing frequent power outages in one Lehigh Valley neighborhood

Thomas Little, by his estimation, used to lose power once a year. But beginning last year, the retired Williams Township cardiologist said, he experienced at least six outages in 2023 and lost power five times during January, including three instances in one week that month.

According to his electric utility Met-Ed’s count, Little has experienced nine “sustained outages” since last year. Eight of those were due to falling trees and one was because of an equipment failure.

Recent storms have knocked out power to thousands across the Lehigh Valley, but the bigger concern, at least in Little’s leafy neighborhood, is a small bug — a voracious insect that kills ash trees.

Several years of attacks by the invasive beetle species known as the emerald ash borer have decimated Pennsylvania’s and other states’ population of ash trees. In Little’s Williams Township neighborhood, where ash and a variety of other trees dominate, that means falling branches and trees are causing outages.

“This is a slowly evolving disaster,” Little called it, later qualifying it as a situation.

“If a hurricane came through here and killed a third of the trees and knocked out power for three weeks, that would be classified as a disaster,” Little said. “The fact that it’s happened in increments … I think we need to think more about it. The tools we apply to disasters need to be applied to this situation.”

Williams Township, a sparsely populated community south of Easton, is known for its farmland and rolling hills, but the ash borer has done significant damage to trees there, according to Little.

He would like someone — local, state or federal government, or the utility — to be more aggressive in removing the trees, even if it means seeking property owners’ permission to gain access to their property. He has presented a petition to Williams Township asking supervisors for help, and filed a formal complaint against Met-Ed, his electric company, with the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.

But Met-Ed says the real responsibility for the trees lies with property owners.

“The majority of outages occur from trees off our right of way (which is typically 10 feet),” Met-Ed wrote in response to a request from state Rep. Robert Freeman, D-Northampton, for information about the outages. “It is the responsibility of the customer to maintain trees on their property outside our right of way, but this often does not happen.”

Little wishes more could be done.

“Service crews have refused to remove dead [standing] trees, pointed out to them by local residents, which are at risk of causing additional power interruptions,” Little wrote in a letter to state Public Utility Commission Chair Stephen M. DeFrank. “Loss of power in freezing conditions results in an inability to heat homes. In this community where water is available only by well, it causes a loss of sanitation. Residents requiring insulin are unable to keep it refrigerated.”

Little hopes the PUC will review and act on his case against Met-Ed.

Met-Ed’s corporate owner, FirstEnergy Pennsylvania Electric Co., in its summer reliability report submitted to the PUC, said it has been proactively removing ash trees off rights of way.

FirstEnergy’s website notes the emerald ash borer is a “significant threat” to urban, suburban and rural forests, as it kills stressed and healthy ash trees. The insect is so aggressive that ash trees may die within two or three years after they become infested.

The iridescent green beetle is believed to have come from Asia through Canada to the U.S., first appearing in Michigan in 2002 before making its way to Pennsylvania about five years later. Because of them, experts say, millions of ash trees are dead or dying.

The PUC, which produces annual reports of service reliability among the state’s electric companies, notes trees and equipment failure are the two most frequent causes of power outages. And in its most recent report, the ash borer again received recognition for its destruction.

“As noted in last year’s report, electric reliability and resilience appears to be most challenged during storm activity that brings down off-right-of-way (OROW) trees, and overhanging limbs from canopy trees above the clearing zones within the right-of-way onto the distribution lines. Many of those trees and limbs are still standing dead vegetation from the ravages of the emerald ash borer and other pests which have attacked the state woodlands.”

PUC spokesperson Nils Hagen-Frederiksen said utilities like Met-Ed and PPL, both of which distribute electricity in Williams, file tree-inspection, maintenance and vegetation-management plans. He also said when the trees are outside the right of way, then it’s a matter involving property owners and the utilities.

“It’s an issue the PUC has raised for years,” he said.

Asked to elaborate, if the issue is one that the PUC expects more from utilities, property owners and others regarding dead trees imperiling power lines, Hagen-Frederiksen said it should be an every-tool-in-the-toolbox approach that includes tree removal, greater collaboration among all parties and utilities’ infrastructure improvements to help harden key systems and make them less vulnerable to outages.

FirstEnergy has a $503 million electric rate increase before the PUC, part of which would be used for trimming trees, including those beyond the utility’s rights of way, according to spokesperson Todd Meyers.

Off-right-of-way trees are responsible for more than 90% of tree-caused service interruptions, according to the company. The utility’s rate filing notes removing more than 2.4 million trees and overhanging limbs that pose a threat to damage poles and wires along 14,000 miles of line, both on and around power line corridors, over the next 10 years would reduce tree-related electric service interruptions.

“Continued investments in a smart, modern energy grid coupled with an expanded vegetation management program that targets trees threatening our equipment will help us deliver on our commitment to providing dependable electricity to homes, businesses and communities,” said Scott Wyman, FirstEnergy’s Pennsylvania operations, said in an April news release when the rate hike was announced.

He said work that has been done helped cut the frequency of service interruptions across Pennsylvania by 14% since 2019.

Morning Call reporter Anthony Salamone can be reached at asalamone@mcall.com .