<p>What is the downside to underground utilities? Why don’t we have them everywhere – cost??</p>
<p>I have underground utilities, but the problem is that we have massive amounts of downed transmission lines in Western Kentucky, so it doesn’t matter where you distribution lines are. In several neighboring counties the transmission system from TVA is so damaged they are telling people it will be 4-6 weeks before resumption of power. Obviously the more lines that can be buried, the better since all efforts can be focused on fewer problems. Another problem for some people here who have above ground lines is that the trees that fell hit their house at the point where their power supply enters the house and they have to have licensed electricians make repairs and then get the inspector to their house before they can be brought up on the grid again. They have been told to expect to be the lowest priority.</p>
<p>My parents live in southern Illinois and every few years they have a terrible ice storm that leaves power off for days. I’d complain if it was Texas but in Illinois in the winter, for goodness sake! Really gotta bury those power lines!</p>
<p>missypie,
I work with several people who live across the river in Southern Illinois and you are right. Power outages are very common for them and there has been much criticism of their utility companies (there are several in the very Southern tip of IL) in the news over the last few years for their slow response time. If utility companies would start burying lines over the next two decades, they would make life so much easier for their customers and for themselves. It must be a nightmare for the workers to respond to these situations in 16 hour days in terrible conditions and the economic resources required to respond have to be substantial.</p>
<p>I am sure they deal with this for large power lines by protecting them somehow, but we have underground lines going into our house. They were chewed by gophers three times (!) before the power company agreed to protect them with “gopher pipe” (pvc pipe, I guess). One time when we were out of town, power went off, and ice melted from freezer and onto the wooden floor. Insurance company paid most of the cost of floor refinishing for the entire downstairs. This was the 3rd time it had happened (of course the power company paid nothing, to my disgust, so we were stuck with the deductible). The power co. has a policy that it has to happen 3 times before they put the gopher pipe on. Grrr… So there is a downside to buried lines, at least in your yard.</p>
<p>Ahhh! So underground lines have their own unique problems. Maybe if they were coated in some inedible substance? Something gophers wouldn’t love to consume? I imagine that locating the precise location of an underground problem would be much more difficult than with above-ground lines. (Yesterday, a group of utilities guys did a yard-to-yard canvass of our neighborhood, looking for downed wires, problems with tree branches, etc., before attempting to restore power. I don’t know if it was just because I was so desperate for electricity, but every one of them looked like a high-fashion model to me. 
) Still, underground seems safer and far more pleasing to the eye than the above-ground variety. …</p>
<p>2vuo6o9–Our power was restored after a bit more than 2 1/2 days. Not bad, considering they’re telling people in outlying areas that it could be three weeks or more before they get light and warmth. Western Kentucky and the city of Danville, south of us, were, indeed, hit hardest. Lexington was not damaged nearly as badly as in 2003. Mine was one of the few lucky neighborhoods to get hammered. :(</p>
<p>intparent–You’re in Minnesota, if I remember correctly. (I have only 3 functional brain cells left these days.) My daughter in Northfield has been gloating over how “nice” it’s been up there this past week or so, “nice” being a relative term. Overall, however, I’ll bet you can beat me in terms of nightmare weather stories. :)</p>
<p>My father used to work with an electric company. He hated underground service–said it was fine as long as everything was working, but to find a problem took tremendous amounts of time and manpower, often leading to long outages while they searched for the problem. His soapbox was to keep trees trimmed away from lines and he ranted about the homeowners who planted trees that would grow into the lines at maturity.</p>
<p>We have underground sewer and water lines so it’s clearly possible to do. Our housing development has had no problem with underground power/cable/phone since we’ve been here to my knowledge.</p>
<p>We have underground service. Around Christmas, we lost power for 12 hours. The repair crew spent 6 hours looking at the ground and then another 6 hours digging and fixing the problem.</p>
<p>Sounds about right, Doc. :)</p>
<p>We had a bad ice storm in 2001. We were without power for 3 weeks. I forget how many poles those electric poor guys had to replace - in the thousands I know. However I discovered that no running water for several days was a lot harder to cope with than no power.</p>
<p>Glad you are doing OK.</p>
<p>Hindoo, actually not many winter weather stories, at least not where we have lost power. The only power outage (other than the gophers) I can recall in the past 8 years is when a guy landing at the nearly small suburban airport hooked his landing gear on the electrical wires (not underground) next to the landing strip. He crashed into a hanger and walked away. We lost power for half a day. </p>
<p>Used to have outages in earlier years when we lived right in St. Paul, but that was midsummer when AC usage was so high it blew something in our neighborhood (routinely one summer, finally ex-H managed to get the power company call center guy to give out his managers’ name. Ex-H called the guy at home at 2 am when our power went out for the 3rd time in 10 days and it was over 90 degrees – amazingly, that did the trick, the issue was repaired permanently the next day!).</p>
<p>Your D is right, it was 40 degrees and sunny today, we had a great cross country ski. Glad you are okay.</p>
<p>:)Hindoo!:)</p>
<p>I’m glad you are doing well, Hindoo. We just returned from a trip to Paducah this afternoon. I have never seen anything like this. We used to live in Missouri and now live in southern IL, so I’ve seen numerous ice storms, but nothing like this. For more than 30 miles, almost every tree was damaged. Easily 90% of them, anywhere from split down the middle to broken branches to the top having broken off. We had 3 big ice storms last year, but most of those trees were uprooted and some split, but no where near the quantity of damaged trees. It appeared that there was just more ice and the sheer weight broke things off. In many places, branches were simply piled under the tree where they fell (out in the country where no one had been cleaning things up). I saw several instances were a tree had 2 or 3 more or less equal branches, and the tree just split down the middle in halves or thirds from the almost equal weight. </p>
<p>A year later, we were just getting to the point were you really had to know where to look to see damage from last year. This is absolutely incredible. In Paducah we also saw 2 stoplights out, even though there was power, so I assume that was from the storm, too.</p>
<p>Good luck to all those who were directly impacted by this terrible storm.</p>