Local man says Hydro clean-up left his land unusable
By William Crooks
Local Journalism Initiative
A Sainte-Catherine-de-Hatley resident says his land has been left in a state of disrepair following a vegetation management operation carried out last fall by Hydro-Québec and Bell. Charles Davies, who owns seven acres overlooking Lake Massawippi, claims that stumps and branches left behind after the utility companies cut trees near the power lines now prevent him from maintaining the property he’s looked after for five decades.
“I’ve been maintaining this for 50 years, mowing the grass and looking after it,” Davies told The Record. “It’s such a mess now that I won’t be able to maintain it. The stumps and branches are still there.”
Davies explained that in the past, large trees growing under the power lines had caused power failures due to falling branches. Hydro-Québec and Bell, in response, cut down the trees last fall but left most of the wood behind. A local sawmill, through an arrangement with Davies’s neighbour Henri Guérin, retrieved logs from Guérin’s property. According to Hydro-Québec spokesperson Sébastien Martineau on April 7, Guérin had also offered to have the sawmill remove logs from Davies’s land.
Martineau says Davies refused the offer. “He chose not to participate in the agreement to send his logs to the mill,” he said. Because of that, commercially valuable wood—defined by Hydro-Québec as anything over 10 centimetres in diameter—was left on Davies’s land, as is standard policy across Quebec. Davies himself said he never had a problem with the removal of the logs as planned. When The Record visited Davies’ property for a photo on April 4, the logs were gone.
