The entire east coast has suffered powerful storms, as well as tornadoes for hundreds of years. When major storms hit suburban and rural areas, trees come down on power, telephone, and CATV lines. Tons of refrigerated food spoil (uncompensated by utilities) and people have to make do without heat, running water, as well as internet service and phones. Even cell phone service is disrupted as cell tower electricity is cut off, and tower backup generators fail to start. Western Connecticut has experienced two recent storms that wreaked havoc on almost a half million people.
Power blackouts after windstorms don’t happen in most western European countries, where the utilities are all underground. Not only are they underground, but the utility companies know exactly where the lines are, so there are few utility strikes from backhoe construction accidents. In this country, there are hundreds of thousands of utility “hits” every year because companies are not required to record location and depth of any lines and excavators run into them.
Connecticut Light and Power (CL&P), one of the major electric utilities in the state, has calculated that it would cost $1 million per mile to place their lines underground and refuses to do so because it is considered too costly. But the last two storms to hit the state in the past few months caused over $200 million in damage and repairs, which could have put 200 miles of overhead lines below ground. Add in the damage done by hurricanes in 1955 and up till today, and the damage/repair estimates will easily exceed $1 billion, enough to put 1000 miles of underground lines in place. CL&P complaints about the in-ground costs have no credibility given the damage that has already been done. And these storms will be occurring with greater frequency as the atmosphere heats up.
Why are the lines all overhead? It was cheap and convenient to do so in the 1890’s, although in urban areas, there was so much congestion in overhead wires that the companies began putting them below ground. Rural areas in mid-Atlantic and New England were mostly farms and grazing land, with only a few trees lining some streets. Hardly any trees were taller than, or interfered with the overhead lines. During the 1930’s, the Great Depression caused thousands of farms to be abandoned, and the grass and farmland reverted to hardwood forest.
Trees in suburban areas today can reach heights of 100 feet and dominate nearby utility lines. Because of their height and proximity, it doesn’t take much of a wind to topple mature trees. Taller trees provide far more leverage when wind strikes them, and each year they grow even higher. Those conditions guarantee that future storms of modest intensity will knock down more trees and continue to wreak havoc all over the northeast.
It is astounding that we allow such a critical part of or lives- electrical power, telephone, cable TV, and Internet communication to be left to the whim of nature. Our infrastructure is worse than that seen in some third world countries. Using wooden poles to carry and distribute utilities in suburban and rural areas is a 19th century technology that should be abandoned.
The solutions?
1) Each state should call on its public utility commissions to force electric, telephone, and CATV companies to place all their lines underground. Give them 20 years in which to do it and put America back to work upgrading our century- old power grid infrastructure. Failure to force this issue will assure more power outages and blackouts in the future, which will ultimately cost far more than the underground solution.
2) Return all utilities to their former status as regulated monopolies, emphasis on regulated. Deregulation was sold in the 1980’s as a free market panacea that would increase competition and lower utility rates for Americans. None of that happened; rather it led to the excesses at Enron, and manipulation of power shortages in dozens of states. Further, under regulation, utilities had large numbers of work crews available for repairs and had financial reserves available for continued maintenance of all of their power production and electrical lines. Today, the utilities only have skeleton crews ready for repairs, and have slashed budgets for maintenance.
This is not simply a matter of inconvenience- it is a matter of public safety and national security and should be treated as such. When our Interstate Highway System was approved during the Eisenhower Administration, it was passed by Congress as the “National Defense Interstate Highway System.” Overpasses had to be high enough to accommodate tanks sitting on flatbed trailers, and strong enough to support the weight of large armored vehicles.
Call the new program the “National Defense Communication Infrastructure System.”
Take the money out of Homeland Security or the Defense budget, which is full of weapons systems that failed to defend us on 9/11.