From what I know their policy is to do it and ask for forgiveness later. My mother in law lives in Rumney and had a bunch of trees on her property abutting the road cut down without her input.

I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, but at some point we have to ask ourselves what trade-offs we need to make to keep our power infrastructure more reliable, especially with the push towards everything being electric. Underground service would be great, but it's not feasible in most of the state, and I'd assume prohibitively expensive.