Quote Originally Posted by kuuma View Post
...Tree trimming is a joke of a solution, it's the equivalent of mdot pouring a hasty patch into a pothole and leaving an equally transient temporary fix. These power lines should have been buried underground in the first place.
While hiking some extremely dense woods near some power lines, I encountered an employee of one of the power companies {DTE? This was long ago.}. He was scouting around checking for overgrowth and he explained that they don't just cut trees down in those remote areas. They also plant aggressive short species that crowd out the tall trees and keep them from reencroaching.

Of course they might not be able to do that in dense urban areas but I thought that was a pretty smart approach to the problem.