TAMPA, Fla. — In St. Pete's Central Oak Park neighborhood, trees line the roads. Most of the trees are full, lush, and round, but others look more peculiar, reminding people of a Y.
Carroll Ann Bennett, a Tampa Tree Advocacy Group member, isn't a fan.
"I think they are a tragedy, and I think they're harming one of the most valuable types of infrastructure we have," she said.
Bennett isn't the only one. We first reported on the Y-shaped trees back in June when Susan Roghair sounded the alarm in her Riverview neighborhood, saying the new look for the trees worried her.
"They don't look stable, really. They just don't look stable," she told ABC Action News at the time.
A spokesperson for TECO told us power companies cut the trees for hurricane season. She added that fallen trees are the leading cause of power outages.
Brian Bovard with the Florida Gulf Coast University Water School added some context, comparing the hurricane responses in South Florida.
"I felt like after Hurricane Ian, there were a lot of places where had we not had Irma and the intensive trimming that took place following that hurricane, that when Ian hit, we would have been in a much worse place," he said.
But Bennett doesn't see how those odd Y shapes are actually preventing a downed power line.
"If you look at the way a lot of these trees are cut, I look at them, and I'm like, 'Well, I don't see how this solves the problem of preventing the lines from being taken out if the tree falls," she said.
We found multiple trees trimmed that way. While the middle mostly remains intact, any branches or limbs that are in the path of the power lines are cut and what's just to the sides of the power lines remains.
"I see it as squandering resources. I feel like the electric company is spending money. It's not accomplishing the goal of preventing the storm from taking the lines out. And I also see squandering of resources for the citizens and for the general community because these trees provide so many benefits," she added.
TECO says they have arborists who approve the tree trimmings. They say each tree trimmed is done based on industry standards.
Bovard adds that trees are resilient. He says cutting them into the shape of a Y likely won't cause any harm.
"The fact that they are woody plant species allows them to store a lot of energy reserves that allow them to put out large amounts of growth above ground so they can grow limbs a lot faster after, say, a hurricane event or a trimming event because they got those resources stored in the woody tissues and their roots and in the trunks of their trees. And so that's part of what allows them to be more resilient to stress events like what you're describing today," he explained.
He adds that they'll be able to adapt when the trees grow.
"Those trees are going to grow up towards that gap above where the tree was trimmed, and they'll fill that in. Now, what they might do if it's a power line situation, they may actually sort of form a circle around the power line, so it looks almost like a doughnut hole around the power line," he said.
But that doesn't ease concerns from people worried about the integrity of the trees.
"If you look at the recent Urban Tree Canopy for the City of Tampa, how much money our trees are worth, how much money they save us. They are solid gold infrastructure, and it's threatening them. Some of them don't survive the type of butchering that many of these tree cutters do for these lines," Bennett said.
This leaves them still asking why the answer to allowing the trees and power lines to co-exist comes in the shape of a Y.
