I live in one of these areas. The power companies do absolutely zero maintenance on the poles and lines. They don’t trim trees and branches at all. There are 800+ lines down in Michigan. They are down because the trees weren’t trimmed and iced up then collapsed on the line. This would have been significantly reduced if appropriate tree maintenance was done.

I’ve not had power for 2.5 days and they haven’t even assigned a crew to my neighborhood. The crews around here have been working on clearing downed lines and trees for the last 60 hours. They haven’t even started restoration processes or even assigned a crew to a restoration or outage area.

This issue was exasperated by the power company not conducting proper preventative maintenance. It is not a freak accident. My power company had record profit last year and a year/year profit increase of 17%. They are not reinvesting anything for proper maintenance.

There are more crews assigned in other counties and their power is being restored faster than mine, even though my county has 2/3x the population and population density. For some reason, we have less crews actively working to restore power than rural counties that have are not being prioritized over rural outages and towns with 2,000-10,000 people. Based off the outage maps, I estimate that rural counties have 4-5x more crews actively working on outages.