dustbury.com: As actual sunlight returns

16 December 2007

As actual sunlight returns

As the lights slowly come back on, Michael Bates proposes a study:

For all the talk about trees, I am wondering how much of the ice storm damage is simply due to the effect of a ½ inch or more of ice on above-ground power lines. The main transmission lines are too high to be affected by trees; did we lose any of them? If no amount of tree trimming will spare us from this kind of situation, we need to weigh the cost of burying the lines against the costs — loss of productivity, loss of perishable food, deaths and injuries. I would love to see an analysis showing how many customers were without power due to various causes — downed line from ice, downed line from tree, blown transformer.

Do the utilities even keep track of these things, or do they just record each incident as a generalized outage? The Corp Comm's Jeff Cloud has already made noises about a feasibility study for burying the lines: the first step, I think, should be collection of this data, and expansion of its scope if necessary.

In the meantime, I tend to agree with Lynne, who commented on a previous post here:

I think all new construction should have lines installed underground, and a plan made to eventually hide existing lines. Time consuming and expensive, but worth it I think.

Clearly there will not be enough funding available to rewire the whole state at once, and if there were, you couldn't possibly get it done before the next ice storm. This is going to be a long, drawn-out process, and inevitably Neighborhood B is going to want to know how come Neighborhood A is getting it first. I see a whole lot of political infighting on the horizon.

Posted at 10:10 AM to Soonerland

Around my neck of the woods the power companies have started taking a "whack the heck out of any tree anywhere near any line" approach. It looks terrible, and has probably doomed a whole bunch of trees. (Before consolidation they used to send trimmers around every year, and not trim so much.) I recall one bad ice storm about 15 years ago which had some metro neighborhoods blacked out for a week.

Yesterday's fun left about 150 homes without electricity in the metro, about 1100 out in a couple heavily wooded southern counties.

Posted by: Old Grouch at 5:54 PM on 16 December 2007

I've heard from power company types that burying power lines just buys you a different set of problems -- not better, just different.

I find the idea intriguing on aesthetic grounds, but can understand that utilities would rather not dick with a system that works -- no matter how poorly -- and in exchange get a whole raft of new headaches... mostly more political and financial than technical.

Posted by: Mark Alger at 9:04 AM on 17 December 2007