On August 14, 2003, a handful of trees in eastern Ohio precipitated the largest unplanned power outage in United States history.  Although seemingly innocuous, inadequately managed vegetation near power lines is often cited as the primary cause of power outages in the United States, costing the national economy billions of dollars each year.  Despite the growing energy demands of 21st Century America and increasing federal and state pressure to improve utility vegetation management (“UVM”), utilities often find themselves embroiled in disputes with local property owners when trying to conduct appropriate but generally unpopular UVM. Because UVM usually takes place pursuant to an easement, also known as a utility right of way, the rights of the utility to conduct UVM on any given parcel are subject to a court’s assessment of the language for that parcel’s particular easement.   As many, if not most, easements date back well before the development of the most effective modern methods of vegetation management, they often may not contain language broad enough to permit those methods.  

In this Article, the author explores the scope and increasing relevance of our UVM problem both before and after the historic blackout of 2003, and proposes a unified approach for dealing with the legal obstacles to vegetation management.  Instead of a piecemeal easement approach, the author suggests that courts, public utility commissions, and legislatures should resolve property-owner/electric utility conflicts under the framework of the public nuisance doctrine and its associated doctrine for nuisance abatement.