yes I agree ready for firewood they may be silver maple an arborist said they were sugar maple maybe they are silever maple

Better photos would help make a determination as to how to proceed. Yes, power company line-clearance contractors can and do make a mess of many trees, but......this simply does not mean that those trees' lives are over. Especially if the crew at least used target pruning cuts instead of leaving stubs-but I can't tell-recovery could be better than you're thinking. Then there's the whole concept of target. Do your kids lay under those trees, looking up at the sky? Do you park your classic car there? What I'm getting at is, say you leave the trees standing and that furthermore, the pruning methodology used was not good, there is now an increased risk for branch failure, if not immediately, somewhere down the road. But even that can be lived with, provided the answers to the questions I posed above-and a bunch more like them-is no.

+om

Silver maples can recover quite quickly from butchering.

Right^. But in doing so, many weakly-attached "suckers"-really just new branches-are formed wherever the cuts were made. I say weakly-attached, but even there, in time, enough new layers of growth are laid up and around these that they too eventually become more sound. The problem is-and here I go with the technical stuff again-silver maple is a poor compartmentalizer, which as a practical matter means that wherever a stub cut is made, decay is very likely to get started.

So, if it seems like I'm telling both sides of the story, it's because I am. As beng said, silvers can and do usually just keep right on growing following such treatment, but at the same time, there is at the least, a temporary stage where there may be some poorly-attached branches, and these branches or suckers-same thing really-will grow very rapidly and in a crowded fashion.

If it were mine, and I wanted to retain these trees in the landscape, I would do so but keep an eye on the structural aspects, for safety reasons. No tree has a warranty that it or a part of it won't fail, but the worst of powerline-clearance practice does lead to many more such events.

+oM

they are ugly :(

Definitely Silver Maple. Not a tree I'd go to great lengths to save. A Sugar Maple, I would, but not a Silver.

I'd make them firewood and plant something in their place, stat. Even if you did try to keep them, they're one ice storm or microburst away from splitting in two, especially once rot sets in from the large, open wounds.

i would prefer not to lose power.. than to worry about a poorly sited carp tree ...

i would have run out there.. and asked them to take it all the way down ..

sorry ...lol

ken

I had an argument with them they wouldnt take it down and wouldnt give me the wood/mulch they butchered my crepe myrtle as well but no badly

Ug. Here after some power failure disasters the utility was compelled to enforce their right of way. A whole political nightmare there. We are lucky they don't bill us directly for tree trimming.

Where I live, power companies are putting all the power lines underground now. No more butchered trees or storm blackouts. But they butchered a lot of tree roots when they did it.

huggorm, trees can recover from root loss however when you butcher a tree it will never be the same again :(

toronado, it is not trimming sadly if they would properly trim trees they wouldnt be such a hazard and would be more beautiful

Poor butchers, always having their skilled trade used to indicate shoddy work in trees! Last time I tried to butcher an animal, it was hard work and I clearly did not know very much about what I was doing!

+oM