Almost Had Another Power Outage

After the storm last week, the Village sent out notice that it would start coming around on the 8th and collecting brush and branches that came down during the storm.  I thought I would take the opportunity to trim a few of the dead branches off my trees and also take off some of the ones that were growing a little bit out of control.  That included the branch that has been hanging over the fence into the neighbor's yard and over his garage.  However, in addition to the fence and his garage, it also goes over a bunch of electric lines.  But I thought I would just cut it to the one side of the lines, so that even if it swung and dropped, it would pivot before the lines.  And in addition I thought if I trimmed off some of the smaller branches coming off of it, I would be OK.

Everything was going good until I got to the point where the weight of the branch got to be too much and it started to crack at the point I was cutting it.  It started to swing down, which would have been that bad, except that there was about a 3 foot branch that was left from one of the smaller ones I had previously taken off, and it was big enough so that when the large branch swung, the weight of the portion of the smaller branch that was left caused the large branch to swing around so that the crotch ended up hooking one of the electric lines.  It was enough that I couldn't simply swing it back, but I still thought I was OK because it was still attached to the main branch.  Unfortunately, that didn't last long.  It finally gave way and dropped so that it was hung up on the electric line.  I don't know exactly how much it weighed, but I had visions of the line snapping and having to call the electric company to come and fix it. 

Lucky for me, the branch was long enough that some of it was touching the ground, alleviating some of the weight on the line.  I was able to climb up on the roof of the neighbor's garage and lift/flip it off the line without snapping it.  So I am counting my lucky stars that I didn't cause another blackout in the neighborhood, or at the very least cut off the power to my house and the next door neighbor's.