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Sabah Electricity (SE) will step up efforts to attend to any trees which may put its assets near a Penampang village at risk, while Telekom Malaysia (TM) Bhd has vowed to do the same when it comes to the overgrown greenery beside a Labuan road. 

This follows separate feedback from a Penampang driver, and another living on the island, about the lack of maintenance carried out on the greenery growing at both locations.

The former spoke out about the presence of a tree on a hillside in Kg Putaton, which had gradually been inching into the airspace over some SE cables along the stretch he took to reach his house. 

He feared that those staying in the village, and others in this part of the Inobong area, might have their power disrupted if the tree toppled onto the overhead lines and dislodged them from their housings or caused them to snap in two.

His Labuan counterpart, meanwhile, expressed similar concerns about a potential telecommunications outage occurring in his housing area, if nothing was done to deal with the overgrown branches which encroached into the path of the TM wires set up along Jalan Tanjung Aru. 

He felt that these misgivings were not far-fetched, after finding a tree branch caught on the TM lines, straddling one part of the road, while driving home one night.

Both individuals provided Hotline with the whereabouts of the affected installations. This information was forwarded to the respective companies. 

A SE spokesman said a preliminary inspection was made of Jalan Kimbambangan, shortly after the company was contacted by the media. 

“Our staff verified the potential risk which the branches bending down to the road posed to our transmission lines,” he said.  “They also assessed the extent of the work which had to be carried out.”

He said its Pruning Unit (Metro) returned the next day to deal with this greenery.

“A lorry and sky-master was deployed to assist the 10-man team with this task.” 

They felled the tree which was bending over, as well as eight others, on the same slope, according to him.

He said the firm was keen to safeguard the wellbeing of its assets in this part of the district.

The spokesman said SE staff had been asked to be more mindful about the condition of the greenery growing along roads where the company’s installations had been set up. 

“This will go a long way to ensuring that our customers are not unduly by any outages which are triggered by overgrown trees in the vicinity. Such greenery is pruned as and when it warrants doing so.” 

TM, too, called on its staff to be more diligent when it comes to looking after its installations around Labuan.

A spokeswoman for the firm said the fallen tree branch was promptly removed from its wires near the junction to the MPL Housing from Jalan Tanjung Aru Lama.

“Four of our technicians went to the area on the same afternoon that we learned of the driver’s concerns,” she said. “They used a ladder to reach the foreign object.”

She said there was no fixed maintenance schedule for its installations on the island.

“Our assets, including the poles and overhead lines, are attended to as and when it becomes necessary to do so.”

She said TM staff had subsequently been asked to be more mindful about the greenery growing on road shoulders where its cables and poles had been erected.