Kelowna residents call out FortisBC for tree-trimming practices: ‘I was shocked’

'It just makes me feel sick,' said homeowner Gordy Charles. 'The trees have been brutalized.'

Kelowna, B.C., resident Giulio Di Palma had all kinds of emotions when he came home after work last month to find his front yard spruce tree half gone.

“I was shocked,” Di Palma said. “Disappointment, upset, violated.”

With its potentially dangerous proximity to power lines, FortisBC  came in to prune the tree but Di Palma said the company did a lot more than that.

“It’s a total hack job,” he said.  “I don’t believe that the limbs that are really on the low side should have been trimmed because you can see the way they swooped down. They’re nowhere near the wires.”

Di Palma lives in the Lower Mission area of the city and a few blocks away, a group of residents living on Fuller and Collett roads have similar concerns about tree-trimming in their neighbourhood.

“It just makes me feel sick,” said homeowner Gordy Charles. “The trees have been brutalized.”

Charles said he supports the safety-related tree trimming practice but not the way Fortis is handling it.  He believes the company is not putting much thought into pruning the trees and instead just taking the easy way out but cutting way too much off.

“When you look at the work, you realize that some of it has absolutely nothing to do with protection of power lines, and some of it it makes you feel like nobody took any thought, there was no arborist involvement in what they did to the trees,” Charles said.