With the new year underway, Dominion Energy is gearing up for another round of tree maintenance along the Washington & Old Dominion (W&OD) Trail, shifting its focus to the Reston area.
The power company has flagged 19 “hazard” trees near its electrical lines for removal in a 2.7-mile stretch of the trail between its Hunter Mill Road substation in Wolf Trap and the Reston substation on Sunset Hills Road, Dominion Electric Transmission Forestry Manager Amanda Keyes told NOVA Parks Executive Director Justin Wilson in a Dec. 16 letter.
“Hazard trees are structurally unsound trees that are either dead, dying, or diseased,” Keyes wrote. “The hazard trees identified for removal pose a threat to not only the high voltage transmission lines but also Trail user safety if the trees were to fall.”
In addition to cutting down those trees, Dominion plans to prune other trees near its transmission lines and substations and remove “undesirable” tall brush within its right of way along the Hunter to Reston section of the trail, according to Keyes’s letter.
The utility will also provide “targeted” removals of invasive plants that have proliferated along the trail in Vienna after it cleared almost all trees from the Clark substation in the town to the Idylwood substation in Dunn Loring in conjunction with a project to install a new transmission line.
After the “aggressive” nature of those clearings prompted criticism from NOVA Parks, which owns and manages the W&OD Trail, as well as residents and elected officials, Dominion appears to have reverted to a more selective approach to tree maintenance.
Like the tree removals and pruning work conducted between the Clark and Hunter substations last fall, the upcoming activities in Vienna and the Reston area have received the support of NOVA Parks. Dominion officials shared their plans with the agency’s planning administrator Mike DePue and W&OD Railroad Regional Park Manager Ryan Corder during a walk-through of the trail last month, Keyes said.
“NOVA Parks is aware of and was involved in the planning of the scheduled vegetation management work along the W&OD Trail between the Hunter and Reston substations,” NOVA Parks communications director Kelly Gilfillen confirmed to FFXnow.
According to Dominion Energy, the new vegetation work is expected to begin on Jan. 20 and take approximately two to three months to complete. Nearby residents will be notified through mailed postcards early this month, and signs will be posted along the trail.
The utility also recently completed work to replant the Vienna and Dunn Loring sections of the W&OD Trail affected by the earlier clear-cutting with pollinator meadows and low-growing, native trees and shrubs.
That process was slightly prolonged by a wait for the Town of Vienna to approve a few sites, but it was slated to wrap up before Christmas, Dominion’s Northern Virginia spokesperson, Aisha Khan, said.
Khan says the more recent maintenance work, including the tree removals planned in Reston, hasn’t been extensive enough to trigger the need for native plant restorations under a draft memorandum of understanding that Dominion and NOVA Parks have been negotiating since spring 2025.
The new MOU governing vegetation management along the W&OD Trail will succeed a voluntary agreement that had been in place since 2005. The result of a similar public outcry over sweeping tree removals, the agreement had limited cuttings to trees directly at risk of interfering with Dominion’s power lines — typically ones that grew to at least 15 feet tall — and committed the utility to replanting any eliminated trees.
Dominion told NOVA Parks it was withdrawing from the agreement in fall 2024 after the parks agency questioned its extensive clearing of trees in Vienna and Dunn Loring.
After some reported initial resistance, the utility agreed last March to reevaluate its tree maintenance plans for the W&OD Trail and began discussing a new long-term agreement with NOVA Parks, which sent an initial draft on April 25.
“The draft MOU is anticipated to be finalized after the holidays, sometime in January,” Khan said.
