About 30,000 customers — almost the entire population of the Connecticut suburb — were without electricity or Metro-North service for several hours on Monday after an 85-foot-tall black locust brought down by Sunday’s massive windstorm shifted and fell into a power line. (Or attacked it, depending on your interpretation.) A spokesman for the town’s utility company said it was the “first time I’m aware of anything like this happening.” Meanwhile, it seems his colleague, NSTAR president Werner Schweiger, saw this coming: “It’s critical to electric service reliability that we not allow trees to continue to grow near high-voltage lines,” he said. Based on this incident, we’re glad we’re not the ones charged with standing up to Greenwich’s apparently hyperaggressive trees.
