Somebody is getting a payoff.
The interim report commissioned by Nashville Electric Service (NES) after half its customers lost power during Winter Storm Fern earlier this year was released on Friday, revealing that the company internally acknowledged its previous vegetation management practices contributed to the significant outages.
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“NES recognized vegetation management was a contributor to outages in Fern,” the interim report revealed. “Immediately following Fern, NES took appropriate, aggressive action to enhance vegetation trimming standards.”
According to the report, these measures included, “wider clearances between trees and power lines, as well as removing any overhanging limbs.”
Obvious Report calls out the obvious cause of the winter fork-off in Nashville and areas covered by NES. But this part is what called my attention:
After the storm, NES awarded $5.3 million in contracts for two companies to identify trees that were damaged during Winter Storm Fern using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology during a February board meeting
Apparently you need high-tech to detect trees that tilted, broke or spilt during ice storm because the good old Mark One Mod Zero eyeball by any arborist or even shady dude doing landscaping from a beat up 1985 Ford F150 cannot detect such miniscule faults.
Yup, somebody is getting a nice “Thank-You” envelope or deposit to his/hers Bitcoin wallet.
I have a passing familiarity with LIDAR.
That is not an appropriate use for it. You do not use it to identify trees that need trimming.
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LIDAR uses lasers to plot points, those points are built into a mesh describing a 3D shape. (No, not a 100% accurate description, but close enough for government work.) So far, so good. Not a problem at all.
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The problem arises in how the output/mesh is created. If you let the software do the work, it will likely miss many of the trees that need cutting. How?
LIDAR takes hundreds/thousands of samples of an area. Hand analyzing those samples is extremely time consuming, so most folks let the software do the work. And, because the software is not intelligent, it will ignore samples that are outliers on the bell curve. As an example, a LIDAR survey I know of ignored a flagpole. And that flagpole had dozens of samples on it, but because it was in an otherwise flat field, the software said it was not valid data, and ignored it.
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Imagine the error rate on sampling trees?
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So, whoever let that contract is either an idiot, or they have a friend in the company.
They apparently peeled off the magnetic "Joe's Lawn Care" sign before the photo was taken.