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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Property rights and easements can be an issue. Our neighborhood already has buried power cables, but the supply lines to our neighborhood are hung on poles – so we get outages regularly. The local electrical company is planning to bury the transmission lines that lead to our neighborhood – but they need to go house-by-house and get quizzical property owners along the path of the cables to sign a legal easement document. What if one owner refuses to sign? What if several refuse to sign? Even we needed to sign a new easement agreement (even though the power line cables are already buried across our front yard) for ‘legal’ reasons.
tl;dr: government and electric companies are not all-powerful and may not have legal access to the property on which they need to bury a long run of cable.
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