Depew, carrying a list of over 500 poles, stands near one of them
WALLKILL –Town of Wallkill Supervisor Daniel Depew called on local public utilities to honor their agreement with the community by removing old wooden utility poles left in the ground next to newly installed utility ones.
Those poles, said Depew, threaten public safety and negatively impact the area’s quality of life.
“We’ve had circumstances where poles had been moved and replaced by a utility company, but the communication lines had been left on the old poles so long, and unmonitored, that years later those poles fell apart in the middle of the day or during a wind storm,” Depew said while viewing some of the poles on Thursday.
The supervisor will introduce a local law giving utility companies 90 days to comply once notified or face fines. This comes after his Public Works Department identified over 500 sites where “double wood poles” are located, even though an agreement exists between the utilities and the state’s Public Service Commission whereby the last utility at a site is responsible for transferring equipment, removing old poles and ensuring the site’s overall safety.
“I don’t want to fine anybody,” said Depew. “I want to work with people, but this is out of control.”
The supervisor intends to share his list of double pole sites with the utility companies, along with a letter and notice, asking that they, in good faith, remove the old poles as they said they would do.
“Orange and Rockland has a pretty robust program in our region of going out and replacing failing poles,” said Depew. “Frontier Communications and Time Warner Cable need to work on better pole site maintenance.”
