Who is responsible for cutting trees that could break a telephone line?

Hi,
Any one know who’s responsibilty it is to maintain tress adjacent to a road that is likley to take out a phone line, It is situated on farm land , No idea who the owner is.
Or do we just wait until it falls over ?

You could (why not) mention it to your Mairie… they will contact whoever… as may be necessary.

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Orange will own the infra-structure and maybe jointly with Enedis (ERDF) if on shared poles.
First point of call may be your Mairie (before they close for the festive season).

@Stella - snap!! (no pun intended!)

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For so many things… the mairie is the first port of call… :+1:

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Over the years we’ve informed our mairie of trees hanging dangerously over power / phone lines. They have promptly sent out a couple of commune workers to deal with the problem. Same with fallen trees over the walking trails. In our commune the mairie is the first port of call for situations like that.

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Depends more precisely on where the tree is. If hanging over public infrastructure such as the road, then the Mairie as first port of call. If it is overhanging your telephone line on private land adjacent to your own, then you can only really hope that the owner, assuming you find out who it is, cares enough to do something about it. We are at the end of the telephone line. Our neighbour’s oak overhangs and even touches, our rather flimsy telephone line. I have mentioned it to the neighbour several times, but he doesn’t care, and is now too old and senile to be able to do anything about it, so if one of the branches snaps in a storm, which it will inevitably given their rotted status, and we lose telephone/internet, well we’ll just be stuffed until Orange can force themselves onto the neighbour’s property to come and fix the line again.

The dumb thing is that there was prior to us moving in a very old and somewhat acrid discussion about burying the cables (EDF overhead too) to our house and a different neighbour’s house lower down the hill), but the useless neighbour in question didn’t want either EDF or Orange digging up part of the communal track which he part-owns for the trench to lay the cables in, so instead posts were put in that go across his land (go figure), hence the overhanging trees (sigh).

Actually… it’s not a “one size fits all”…
It could well depend on circumstances and personalities, as much as anything else…

we have a situation locally… trees on private land are damaging/threatening phone cables to a particular property… causing the phone/internet to malfunction (??)

The problem has been reported directly to the mairie by the person whose line is threatened. The mairie has checked the trees’ ownership… (communal or private)… and has contacted the tree owner explaining what needs to be done.

The mairie is now following the progress… :wink: :upside_down_face:

TBH I thought the utilities have a way leave over private land to access their infra-structure for maintenance - in much the same way that the owner of an adjoining property has to maintain his roof, gutters, walls etc.

Certainly EDF does across our land. There is a pylon on a neighbouring farmer’s field and the way they get to it is either by helicopter or across our field. The servitude was written in our purchase document,

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Try this website. https://www.enedis.fr/aide_contact/assistance We had a tree on our property that had fallen on the telephone and Hydro lines on the road outside our property and a message to this site had it dealt with very promptly. Chris Batch.

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Marie has a map of everything. Pop in, ask to see your location. It will show all neighbours, names, etc. Good way of getting to know them. We sent all ours an invitation to afternoon tea, within weeks of arrival. All came, including some parents. Contact details, etc exchanged. Not a problem since. They liked my wifes scones.

We get an automatic notification every couple of years that such & such a company will be coming round to chop the tops of our trees that line the road, we then have the pick up the mess,. I don’t mind as at least we don’t have to do the cutting work in the first place.
We have a line that is along an internal boundary (road to roof) we do this one ourselves, it’s a rowan so it get’s done every 3 years

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It depends on who owns the land.

Unfortunately the plan cadastres don’t give enough details to show the demarcation between the parcelles and the chemins.

We have just had a problem with some trees damaging the power cables. some of the trees are down to a local vigneron and others down to the commune.

Our neighbour is going to deal with the trees that are clearly his but now have to talk to the maire about getting the commune to deal with the rest.