...along with a roadside telephone pole in our upper olive grove, and four massive wooden poles between the two snapped like toothpicks and wires tangled in our trees. Yowza!
The weirdest thing was discovering it all in reverse order, meaning from the roadside telephone pole on down. As I returned from food shopping yesterday morning and looked right from the Strada della Romita at our upper grove trees, I did a double-take. I missed something I thought I'd never miss, but now that it wasn't there, I sure did notice. What I discovered after pulling in and parking had me leave the bags of food I had bought in the car's back seat until the next morning. Definitely a "reality reset" sort of moment.
Readers of last year's Thanksgiving post may recall my writing that, in addition to planting 24 new trees, we planned to take down two thick bundles of unsightly phone lines held above our upper grove by a row of ugly old poles descending towards our valley.
As it happened we did the dig and laid the in-ground conduit back in March. But when we asked the phone company to follow through and take down their poles they asked us for €7000. That was over double the figure I had budgeted, so I put the take-down on hold.
Now mother nature has obliged. A series of heavy rains up through this past Friday along with perhaps a well-placed puff of wind brought that 16-meter-high oak in the video down over a deeply soaked and softened forest floor. As it fell, its mass slammed into the bundled phone lines running horizontally beside it. The resulting force was enough to snap four solid wood poles each 56 cm (22 inches) in circumference and pull the rest of the supporting structures very sideways.
Am I glad? When I first became aware of the destruction yesterday morning I would have balked at the question. Now I'm ambivalent. Not the neatest of demolitions, for one thing. So, lots of cleanup to do.
Also, one of our older trees has had its 80-year-old trunk nearly cleaved in half by one the wood poles that didn't snap. In fact that tree now appears to be bracing both the pole and the lines overhead, keeping it all from falling to earth. Untangling all that will be delicate, and whether and how the tree will heal is an open question.
But, ignore the splintered poles and the criss-cross of cables now stretched just a meter or two above the ground and our grove already looks better without those poles and phone lines silhouetted against the sky.
All may yet take a turn for the worse once a crew and equipment arrive to pick up the pieces, making a muddy mess hauling and maneuvering in a soggy grove. The crew won't be of my choosing, and they'll be answerable to the phone company, not me (they'll be taking down phone company property). With the start of our harvest just 10 days away, none of this bodes well. But maybe, just maybe, depending on what happens over the next few days, some wet wet weather and a puff of wind may have saved us seven thousand euros.
Update, October 21: A discouraging day, despite a surprisingly quick response from the local phone company techs. True that far fewer wires in the sky above the grove is a relief, but, as I continued to traverse the affected area this afternoon, the sight of all that metal and plastic tangled in our trees began to weigh me down. Plus I worry that the aforementioned 80-year old olive that's partly bracing the pole in the second picture up from this update is not gonna come out of this well. Granted, there's a lateral tension cable helping to stabilize the pole but the weight of the phone lines that descend into the valley from its apex is considerable, and those lines are under serious tension now that the fallen oak has brought them hard against the ground. We want to relieve that olive tree of all that stress, but removing the pole without further damaging the tree may require more men, equipment and expertise than the phone company is willing to commit. The tree also happens to be in a quite steeply sloped portion of our upper grove, which won't make the job any easier. I talked to as many people as I could today: the local forestry police, the fire department, an arborist, a excavation contractor I know well and two techs from the phone company, one of whom was on-site this afternoon. Here's a video I made and sent to Marco, the local lead technician, asking him to please send a crew over asap to at least try to salvage that tree.
Update, October 23: Some good news today. Marco (lead phone company tech) texted me to say that he managed to convince his higher-ups to use our in-ground conduits when the damage is repaired. He also promised he would be on-hand to personally oversee the work. So our upper grove will be forever freed of those ugly poles and cables, and on the phone company's nickel (although we paid about €4400 for the dig and placement of the underground conduits back in March). Marco couldn't give me a date yet, only that the work has been requisitioned. Our groves are soggy and more rain is forecast over the next several days. It won't be an easy or neat job when that crew shows. To give them more time, I've decided to split our harvest this year: inner grove on the 30th and 31st of October, upper and lower groves on November 8th and 9th. Hopefully all the poles and cables will be history by that second date.🤞
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