Did Your Power System Survive the Hurricanes?

No areas inland see little force from hurricanes to warrant the change or burden the public with the cost.

I also question where this is going. We can not totally prepare for what nature will brings our way. We now going to tell the citizens in the north that get major snow storms they can't plant trees in their yards. Because a limb weighted with snow may fall off and take out the power lines. Or those that wish to build in areas that have had mud slides they will have to provide their own utilities as the company can prove the ground stable enough to provide it.

Now that reply is just not too bright. If we cannot prepare for every possibility we should not prepare for any?

I lived through the Ice Storm of the Century, without power for two weeks, booted from my appartment for weeks and all in sub-zero weather.

And when it was all over Hydro Quebec restrung the wires and rebuilt the towers. did they bury any of these essential cables? ....... no! Watching weather systems today I have a feeling we will see the "Storm of the Century" every year or two now.

If it were up to me we would harden all the utility systems.

My local utility company has changed out the vast majority of its primary supply lines to underground cabling and is still working on changing the rest of its lines as well as they come up for scheduled service or replacement.

That continual change out of old overhead line to new underground line has largely prevented storm damage from having large scale outage effects in my area for most of my lifetime now.

That really is the best way to go. Odd this should come up, we're under a tornado watch now in the northeast.

Underground is certainly the best way to be prepared for storms - there's really no other way to harden the system effectively.

Where I live there are very long distances for power transmission without much settlement or infrastructure in between. You don't know which area is going to be affected in a storm situation, or how difficult it will be to access and repair the damage afterwards. Still I would expect that changing to an underground power system would be very expensive - more expensive than repairing or replacing parts of the existing system when they are damaged.

There was a fair bit of damage here due to Hurricane Igor, and some people were without power for days. But this sort of thing happens periodically - at least once in ten years we have had major damage and power lost for 4 days or more to significant numbers of people. Outages due to severe storms that last a day or so are more common. Most (sensible) people here have an established backup plan for those eventualities.

We do not fault the power company, and the linesmen are a heroic bunch, who really go the nine yards to get the system up again when the weather pounds it down.

I don't think its all that expensive in comparison to what overhead line costs in the long run. Being we are one of the least populated areas for our size and our electric rates are still lower than most places.

Or it could be that our electric service companies just know how to manage their money far better than the rest of the country does.

Plus as a lineman told me once. I love those little green boxes on the ground. If I slip and fall while working on one I will live to tell about it. Also the farming community appreciates the underground change overs as well since it gets the obstacle course of poles out of their fields too.

"...since it gets the obstacle course of poles out of their fields too."

And removes the overhead power lines that seem to attract aluminum irrigation pipes, grain drills, backhoe stingers, and dump box bodies.

Around here they plow them in at a roughly 36 - 48 inches which puts them well below the depths that any farming equipment normally goes down and when crossing streams and other waterways they have normally do that with horizontal boring in order to put the lines in far deeper to help prevent line damage problems from future washouts or erosion. A new underground line that crossed the stream in the pasture next to my place was horizontally bored to roughly 16 feet below the surface, I was there and had to ask how it worked of course, and started and ended some 100+ feet on each side of the stream. I have serious doubts that one will ever washout!

What is also interesting to me is the new technology relating to underground power line diagnostic equipment that determines where a line is broke or shorted out. The old underground line went bad in my dads pasture three times in two years and all three times their line diagnostic equipment told them where to dig to within 5 feet of the actual damaged point which is impressive being that the ends of the line are far from where the short circuits happened.

Other than someone running over the green junction boxes or digging up a line most of the system is immune to all typical forms of weather, lightning strikes, and even flooding being all of the connections inside the junction boxes are sealed and water tight. Around here in the spring its common to see many of those junction boxes in low areas underwater despite being live. I think its that very low level of long term maintenance related costs that largely offsets and justifies the additional purchase price of the cable.

Relating to installation costs a good cable plowing dozer rig typically costs about the same as the overhead line installation trucks and related equipment needed for overhead line work despite needing less people and being able to bury more miles of line per working day than any overhead installation crew of the same size can install.

Yes unfortunately in some locations underground cable is impractical due to soil conditions however that does not represent all of the locations it is proving to be a great benefit regarding its installation, service life, and overall lifetime maintenance issues.

If your wondering how I know this stuff my local utility company is very open about what it does and does outstanding PR work to promote themselves!

Many have suggested the practice of placing the utility line under ground. Not saying if it is better or not. Just that here we have also had outages during high seasonal rains. Some times degraded insulation or connections are not detected for years until wet weather causes a problem shorting them out.

I don't see where digging them up to be repaired would be any cheaper or faster. Even those that are ran in man ways have to be pumped out before a crew can address the issue.

When you own your own equipment cost of operation is considerably cheaper that paying a contractor to do it for you.

As far a underground line maintenance goes the one line they replaced in our pasture a few years ago was there for over 25 years with zero maintenance done to it. Three burnout repairs in two years was enough to justify a whole new line being installed which was considerably bigger and of a much higher voltage rating than the old one was. I was told its life expectancy is to be at least 50 years or higher.

Despite our harsh climate where we have many days with very high average wind speed, soaking seasonal rains, ice storms, blizzards, and a sparse population per square mile planned maintenance outages for substation work and new line connections now account for the vast majority of the hour or two a year of total outage time we don't have. Wind, rain, ice and snow have no effect on underground power lines. plus direct lightning strike damage is rare being there are so few places where it can hit an underground line.

Around here we don't waste money on stuff that doesn't work and underground power lines have more than proven themselves in the last 30 years to be reliable and worth the higher initial costs to install when weighed against their long term service costs.

I would suspect that much of both the degree of protection provided and cost depend on voltage.

The higher the voltage the more users a line would normally serve - the greater the savings in preventing damage. Individual home connections are a matter of convenience to the homeowner rather than anything else.

Earthquakes would seem to be a real enemy of underground service.

In North Carolina & Oregon I have had underground service put in to subdivisions and had to provide the trench - that was what the utility considered 'extra cost'. Not putting in poles canceled out the extra cable cost.

The standard depth locations that I am aware of for underground service is 42 inches.

Are you talking about service to an individual home? If you are a lot of the new homes here are done that way. Cost wise I would believe its cheaper. The construction company usually has the equipment. Don't have to provide the pole. The line is though ran from a pole which carries the main. I do not think the what the state of Texas was concerned about the individual feeds to homes. But protecting the mains.

What I am referring to is the primary side lines that carry the 7200/14400 volt power from the utility substations several miles away up to the home owners service transformer.

The underground cable looks just like a massive coaxial cable about 1 1/2 inches in diameter with a 2/0 or larger center conductor and multi stranded outer conductor while having a 25 KV rated voltage I believe. The lower voltage 120/240 volt lines are also buried from the service transformer or meter box to the home around here as well. Very little of any the power lines are overhead in the newer residential installations.

Protecting the higher voltage installations would do more. For an area to be without power for a week while disaster recovery is underway id not such a big thing.