Last week, the Fairfax and Loudoun counties boards of supervisors and the Arlington County Board unanimously passed resolutions urging Dominion Energy to pause its tree cutting work along the Washington and Old Dominion (W&OD) Trail, The Washington Post reported. Officials asked the energy company to return to its typical practice of only pruning and removing trees that pose a clear risk to transmission lines.
Location of Trees Cut Along W&OD Trail
Dominion has an easement on a 33-mile portion of the trail to maintain control of the transmission lines. Typically, the power company trims and prunes trees along the easement, said Paul Gilbert, executive director of the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority.
But officials, trail users, and nearby homeowners expressed alarmed in November when Dominion started cutting down thousands of trees. The trees were located along a 4-mile stretch of the trail in Fairfax, from Vienna to Dunn Loring.
According to The Washington Post, Dominion sent some residents a notice on October 24 about the project. The notice only mentions the removal of “some shrubs and trees.”
“They did not indicate in any way that they were going to take out literally every tree, from one edge of the property to the other,” Gilbert told The Washington Post. “There’s a few little scraggly trees here or there left, but 99 percent of them have been removed in this area.”
Dominion Energy’s Response
In an email to ABC7, Dominion Energy spokesperson Howell Carper wrote, “The work we are doing along the W&OD trail is vitally important to protect the safety and reliability of the power grid. Providing safe and reliable electricity to our customers is our most important mission, and we take that obligation very seriously. It has been 20 years since we have done significant forestry maintenance along this transmission corridor. Since that time, the tree growth in the area has become an unacceptable risk to the safety and reliability of the grid.”
In another statement, Dominion Energy spokesperson Aisha Khan said, “We’ve been very transparent about our work along the W&OD Trail and continue to maintain a strong, decades-long relationship with NOVA Parks. In the last three months, we have met with NOVA Parks twice and our two field teams have had additional meetings that resulted in good collaboration. Our focus for the next two weeks is to complete the work on the section that involves Fairfax and Vienna. We will then pause our work, turning to a review of the remainder of the W&OD Trail.”
While work is paused, Khan said the company “will conduct a span-by-span review of the right of way and identify trees that need to be removed. Following this review, we will schedule another series of meetings with NOVA Parks and other interested parties.”
Future Plan for the Area
Gilbert told The Washington Post that the park authority will work with local officials to come up with a plan to restore tree to the affected area. “We’ll present that to Dominion — and that will include a robust restoration of the area that has been damaged, and protocol for how to move forward with other cutting that needs to be done in the future,” Gilbert said. “It needs to be very different from how they have acted in the past, with lots of coordination, evaluation of resources, and restoration after work has been done.”
Photo by Christin Boggs Peyper
