Vegetation Management

There’s a lot that goes into deciding where and when to trim trees that are near our lines. 

When you make a request for a tree to be trimmed through our tree trimming program, it must meet certain criteria. If the tree is deemed to not be a threat to our infrastructure, it may be your responsibly, or a third party’s responsibility to remove or manage the tree. To learn more about responsibilities of different parties, click here.

Any emergency situations, like fallen branches that have resulted in downed wires require our immediate attention. Downed wires are high voltage and dangerous. If you see a wire that poses a threat to you or your community’s safety, please contact us directly at 1-800-428-6230.

We trim trees and branches along approximately 1,000 km of powerlines annually. That’s about the same distance from Halifax to Quebec City. 

Tree contacts are the single largest cause of power outages in Nova Scotia. Because severe weather typically causes tree damage and outages, we target hard-hit areas after each storm by trimming more trees and removing weakened branches that may cause problems later. For example, in the weeks and months following Fiona, we addressed 5,000 areas that had tree damages that could have caused outages in in the future. 

Going forward, our plans will include increasing our tree trimming investment year over year, and nearly doubling our annual investment over the next five years to continue to improve reliability. 

Our team only removes trees that we need to. We leave tree species like Alder trees in places where they'll never grow high enough to pose a threat to our powerlines. 

Both Nova Scotia Power and the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) are responsible for tree trimming within HRM.

HRM manages the tree trimming on all municipality owned trees (typically the trees between sidewalks and the roadway), and we manage the trimming on all privately-owned trees that may pose a risk to our electrical system. This includes any trees that are close to high voltage wires, or any branches that are laying on our lines, or causing damage to our equipment. It's important to note that before trimming on private property, we first need the customer's permission.

Customers are responsible for trimming around the low voltage wire that runs along the street to your home, communications wires, and the support cables that provide physical support to our poles.

For more information on tree-trimming responsibility and submitting a request, visit this page.

Our vegetation management team is made up of highly trained forestry professionals and technicians. This team is experienced in assessing what trees pose potential hazards, based on species, tree health or ground conditions.

On any given day, we have anywhere from 50 to 60 contractor crews trimming trees across Nova Scotia. You’ll often see Asplundh, Lucas Tree Experts or R MacLean Forestry vehicles completing this work.

Our power line technicians are also trained in some aspects of forestry work and may need to trim trees as part of a response to an outage.