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?
In: 2197
Generally it’s a problem of right of way subsequent to a problem of technology .
Up until about the ’70s, or maybe the ’60s, we didn’t really have good continuous insulation machines. Like wires from the 40s tended to be wrapped in cloth soaked in various chemicals, or led. None of these insulators would have been good for electrical current .
And you go back further you get to the time where there was no electrical infrastructure at all. So after that time we get to the point where the first electrical infrastructure is being put in but it was terribly unreliable and the roads and houses have already been built. So there was no practical way to bury those cables, and the cables would have failed far too often, and people walking along the street would have been electrocuted with great regularity, and a huge amount of power would have been lost to grounding.
All in all the technology to really bury power cables whole scale didn’t come into its own until the 80s or the 90s .
But that circles you back around to needing to dig up all the infrastructure to move it underground. like digging up the streets in the houses and getting permits to run the cables and all that stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, it is happening slowly but surely .
There’s also some of the problems to do with soil composition. If the soil is easily compacted then you basically have to build a road bed in a deep pit lay the cable on top of that road bed and then build another roadbed on top of it to keep the entire assembly reasonably rigid. If it’s not rigid enough the shifting of the dirt will slowly stretch the cable and eventually cause it to fail.
Simply put it is not as easy a task to accomplish as it is to simply put out in words.
Most new housing communities and electrical power regions have underground power these days. When you’re starting with a clean slate it’s very easy to do and the technology is right there.
Basically it’s the difference between doing something from scratch and having to redo something entirely .
Like if I even had the money to move all of the power for some 18th century city in the south underground, with the residents want to be without power for the probable months it would take to accomplish all at once?
So there’s a whole bunch of cost and logistics problems to be solved.
As an aside you’ve also got the mapping and detecting problem: once you bury something you have to be able to keep track of where it’s buried to make sure somebody doesn’t dig it up while doing something else.
As a counterpositive New York City has virtually everything underground, but there’s a whole infrastructure and geographical ecology taking place underground with all the steam tunnels and things that existed before the power company came in. There’s literally decade after decade of changing underground landscape. The number of weird things you can find under a city like old pneumatic tubes is pretty amazing sometimes.
EDIT: FFS Children. I never said anything was impossible. I never said anything shouldn’t be done. I was outlining the reasons why it didn’t happen. And yes the lack of political will factors into it steeply. And then of course our entire infrastructure is rotting because we’ve had decades of right-wing tax complainers. United States is infamous for not doing the right thing soon enough. We haven’t even fixed our healthcare system and that doesn’t require digging up a single bloody thing. Hell our bridges are falling down all over the place. Or they’re about to anyway. The US pretty much stopped spending on infrastructure in the ’80s, thank you Ronald Reagan and proposition 13 in California etc. Lots of our cities have underground power. And our newer suburbs. But our older suburbs not so much. Virtually no metropolitan area with a building taller than four stories or a modern supermarket has above ground wiring for power. It’s our sprawling expenses of single family dwellings built between about 1930 and 1980, however, have lots and lots of power poles. It’s almost like there is no such thing as one answer for a country the size of a continent.
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