In areas that get a lot of hurricanes like New Orleans, why isn’t most of the electricity run underground where it’s less vulnerable by now?

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In areas that get a lot of hurricanes like New Orleans, why isn’t most of the electricity run underground where it’s less vulnerable by now?

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19 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I live in houston and I can answer this. It’s really, really expensive, and companies don’t want to pay for it and legislatures aren’t going to force them to. That’s about the short of it.

For the longer answer, when maintance is required, that too becomes much more expensive, requiring crews to dig up yards, and possibly sections of streets, parkin lots, etc. It doesn’t matter how well it’s planned initially, people tear down houses and rebuild, empty lots with underground wires become buildings, all of that adds to the expense and difficulty maintance as well as added cost to the builder to bring the underground sections of wire above ground before entering a building or home.

Lastly, invarible, no matter how good the record keeping, eventually some sections will get “lost” or “misplaced.”

Sure, there are solutions to all of the specific problems I mentioned, but they all increase cost, significantly. Oh, one more thing I forgot to mention, the cost of transitioning through an infrastructure that’s already in place. NO is about 400 years old, it’s a dense city, the cost of tearing it up to move powrelines is astronomical. Rural or undeveloped areas can put in below ground power lines when they are first developed, but then you run into all of the problems mentioned above.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Why don’t we move everyone from new orlands, to a government land, open a new city, and then make new orleans a government land, and make it just a park that nobody cares if it floods or not, because nobody lives there, because it’s a stupid idea to live there.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m a civil engineer who specialises in utilities engineering / BIM coordination so I feel I can give some clarity on this, in my country anything 33KV and under must be under grounded; which leads to a variety of issues in itself as there are numerous requirements for clearances to other utilities such as gas / water / sewer and stormwater drainage. You’ll also run into problems where cables being too deep will result in cable rating issues (cable loses power the deeper it goes and how many bends in the cable run) 2m is generally the max I’d go and even then I’d still use thermal backfill to stop the cables from getting so hot. Combine these issues with shit ground conditions and a water table higher than I am right now and you’re in for an expensive and time consuming time. Overhead cable has always been quicker to build / fix / maintain for most of human history but recent studies have shown they are actually quite bad for your health and end up being expensive in the long run with a relatively low service life compared to correctly built underground cable.
We have the ability now to bore banks of 10x200mm conduit / pilots over hundreds of metres, although we are limited by friction and bending it’s become a very effective way of cabling under rail and through shitty ground conditions.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It cost money. That bad. Money for infrastructure bad, money for bombing other countries good.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s more expensive, the company doesn’t care about you, they get bailed out by the government for failures like these. Do you want me to continue?

Anonymous 0 Comments

Not american here. What i have gathered about that zone is that neither the people or the authorities care. They’d rather build cheap and rebuild after every disaster, than building expensive and disaster proof infrastructure.

You’d think NO should have one of the most wind and water resistant infrastructures in the world but the houses are no very different that paper.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I see answers saying how expensive it would be. But come on, it’s more expensive than all the damage done over decades of storms beating the shit outta the city?

Anonymous 0 Comments

Politics. Politicians have a hard time selling a long term infrastructure plan like going UG for electrical. When you take into cost how often all the overhead lines get absolutely wrecked, UG would probably be cheaper. Most new construction is UG cause it’s easier and cheaper to throw it in when a neighborhoods still getting constructed. Rough numbers, overhead is close to 5-10 bucks per LF while underground is about 20-40. So 4x the amount but your maintaince costs is much lower since you’re not worried about underground hurricanes, if they exist.

And about the water table, the line won’t get “flooded” or “shorted” as often as people think. There’s plenty cities and even countries (Netherlands) where <14kv electrical lines get runned underground without as much problems as people in the comments say there will be. People have already slowly started paying the premium for UG services off easement poles, just a matter of time before those easement poles go UG as well.

Anonymous 0 Comments

So as someone who designs power utilities there are multiple reasons. Most new systems are going underground for looks and alot of cities require it, in some fire hazard areas it is safer to have underground lines.

Alot of existing stuff requires permits and right of ways, if something breaks we cannot just replace it with what we want. Most of the time the easement will only allow us to replace exactly what is there already.

Believe it or not most utilities prefer overhead equipment, it is easier and cheaper to maintain. If something goes bad you can drive from block to block patrolling the line looking for the problem. With underground you have to locate faults and bad equipment with the process of elimination its something that is not apparently damaged, this can sometimes take up to 10 times longer to locate and fix.

And like many others have stated. Alot of it is also geography, ground water, terrain. Is it rocky or high water table, is wind an issue, is ice an issue, heat in the summer causes some oh lines to sag way low so we have to use different wire to pull it tighter.

Really the bottom line is cost. All utilities care about is dollars, if a utility can do something cheaper and safer and more reliable they will most likely do it either as part of a budget upgrade or when something goes bad they replace it with better stuff. But also the utilities are not going to go out of the way to spend money unless they have a reason. It is really a double edged sword most of the time.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I have a stupid question as a follow-up: are you guys talking about power cables outside cities or are there actually cities with “exposed” power cables?