And because I had personally stood in a bucket at the top of it in 2009 changing out an insulator in a sleet storm. So the morning after my third fence conversation with Vanessa, I called Grant Ellison.
Grant is an operations supervisor at the utility. He is 52, with a flat voice.
The kind of man who says four words where other people use 40. We worked together for 6 years and I trust him because I have watched him tell a vice president no.
I told him what was happening, gave him the pole number off the tag and asked him to look at his system. He was quiet for maybe 40 seconds while he typed.
Then he said, "There is no work order for Silver Pines." I asked, "Is there a relocation request open? Anything pending?
Anything in engineering review?" Nothing. No request, no estimate, no design.
Nobody has contacted us about that structure in 18 months. And the last contact was a vegetation crew.
That was the first moment I felt real cold in my stomach. And I want to be clear about why.
Up to that point, I had assumed the worst case was a fight. Letters, maybe a survey, maybe a lawyer, maybe a year of unpleasantness at the mailbox.
What Grant just told me meant something different. It meant that whatever Vanessa had told her contractor, she had not gotten it from the utility.
It meant that if a crew showed up and put a saw to that pole, there would be no de-energization, no switching order, no crew standing by, no isolation of the circuit, and no notification to a single one of those 180 houses. I told Grant the association had crews scheduled for the following day.
He said he would send somebody out to look and he would flag it internally, but he also said the thing that made the timing so ugly. He said his inspector was on a substation job 40 minutes north and the earliest he could get eyes on it was 2 days out.
2 days out was going to be too late and both of us knew it. I spent that evening doing the only thing I have ever found reliable, which is building a record.
I wrote the third email. I made it short enough that nobody could claim they had not read it and specific enough that nobody could claim they had not understood it.
I wrote that the utility had confirmed there was no work order, no relocation request, and no clearance associated with the structure. I wrote that the conductors were energized.
I wrote one sentence in bold, and I remember typing it and then sitting there looking at it because I already suspected how the answer would come back. The sentence was, "Do not remove or disturb the pole until the electric utility confirms authorization in writing." I sent it at 8:19 in the evening.