OF COURSE, NOT ALL AREAS DAMAGED BY HURRICANE KATRINA REQUIRED THE SERVICES OF TREE-TRIMMING CREWS. In areas where the storm surge reduced homes to concrete slabs, there was no need for electric service. But, tree-trimming crews were essential in responding to wind-caused outages in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. Tree-trimming crews were ubiquitous in all areas where line rebuilds were underway, often coming in and cleaning up before the line crews could do their work.

The Cleco service territory in Louisiana was hit every bit as hard as the regions that gained national attention by the mainstream media. The portions of the town of Slidell situated on Lake Ponchartrain were devastated by the storm surge. Flooding further inland resulted in residential and business sections of the city being uninhabitable. Further out, the town of Covington was decimated when whole battalions of 70-foot pines lost their battle against the winds of Katrina and were slung like pixie sticks across roadways, taking out homes and businesses and obliterating power lines.

The rebuilding of a 4.1-mile (6.6-km) stretch of line along Mililtary Road is a good case in point. Along this stretch that originally consisted of 137 poles, 65 of the poles were knocked to the ground with another 30 missing cross arms and insulators. Forty-two poles essentially remained intact, although often still leaning at odd angles. Cleco requested that the Department of Transportation close off this segment of the road to speed up the recovery. Asplund Tree Service worked the encroaching right-of-way so that out-of-town crews from Oklahoma Gas and Electric and Haynes Utility could commence with the line rebuild.