'Reality check' needed on rural power line maintenance - ICMSA
The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers' Association (ICMSA) has said that it is "time for a reality check on the maintenance of rural power lines".
The comments come as around 7,000 homes, farms and businesses are still without power following Storm Éowyn, which hit Ireland two weeks ago.
ESB Networks said that power has been restored to 761,000 customers following the storm and "intensive work" is continuing.
Technicians from the UK, Austria, Finland, France, Germany and Norway are currently supporting over 2,500 local ESB Networks crews and partner contactors in the worst impacted areas.
They have been joined by ESB colleagues from the south and east of the country, along with skilled retirees.
As the efforts to restore power and communications continue, the ICMSA president Denis Drennan has proposed that trained local farmers should be "contracted out" for basic maintenance of hedgerows and trees overhanging cables.
Drennan claimed there is a "delusion" that the ESB and other operators were able to maintain to "an acceptable basic degree the vast networks of poles and overhead wires running across the country and through farmers’ fields".
He noted that "this was not a reflection on the competence of the ESB or other service providers, but rather a factual observation" given the scale of the network which extends into every "boreen".
“We have had a ‘reality check’ and that means accepting the need to change the system around power line management that Storm Éowyn so completely exposed as no longer feasible or effective”, he said.
The ICMSA president said that there has been many instances where ESB poles were "no longer sufficiently robust and had become brittle".
He said that this situation was compounded by the issue of ash dieback with thousands of diseased roadside trees unable to withstand even sub-storm winds.
Drennan said it is now time to think about supporting landowners to maintain hedgerows under powerlines to a defined standard.
He said that local farmers were the "best positioned to monitor the threat presented by such trees" after appropriate training.
The ICMSA president said that farmers already carry out hedgerow maintenance within their farms on an annual basis.
“We have to accept that the kind of intensity and frequency of these storms signals a change and we have to change our preparation and response accordingly.
"ICMSA thinks that there’s a really compelling and practical case for the ESB to enter agreements with willing local farmers to look after and maintain the hedgerows as well as monitoring the condition of poles.
"Any removal of large trees would have to be carried out by trained personnel, subject to the agreement of the landowner," he said.
"We just have to accept that the days of expecting the ESB to know about every pole from Malin to Mizen and every boreen in between is just delusional and is going to get us into the kinds of situations that we see today where farm communities and rural towns are without power for nearly a fortnight," Drennan added.
