DTE Hit With $54M Lawsuit For Cutting Trees In Suburban Neighborhood

DETROIT (WWJ) - A $54 million dollar lawsuit has been filed against DTE and a tree contractor.

The basis of the lawsuit contends that hundreds of century old hardwood trees in Bloomfield Hills were cut down without residents authorization or notification by DTE last year.

Inge Gray is one of about 20 residents suing.

"When it happened in December, I was in a frenzy, I was in a panic to get it to stop, they had mass amounts of trucks there, and they took down these trees in a manner of days ... it just happened so quick there wasn't even much time to react - so I felt they were going at this in a 'cut now, apologize later' way," said Gray.

She says that DTE came on to her property and "clear-cut a large portion of our trees, the mature trees that are a hundred years old.  We had a lot of black locust trees and without letting us know that they were doing anything beyond just standard maintenance ..."

Gray also claims that notice was not given.

She said she understands that the need to maintain reliable power is important. "We did experience power outages firsthand and think line maintenance would be ... for maintaining that, and that involves trimming, not clear-cutting huge amounts of property in our area."

In a statement, DTE says while they cannot comment on the specifics of the lawsuit, they do say that their "vegetation management program is done year round to improve service and reliability.

DTE states they use national guidelines when they work with trees, and they do notify their customers ahead of time.

And they say in this case they did work with Bloomfield Hills and Bloomfield Township--before starting the work.

Attorney Geoffrey Fieger is handling the lawsuit and he says DTE and its tree-cutting contractor had absolutely no authority to chop down the trees