Ask Lemmy

It sure is frustrating as an American to be like "why is x not done this other way that's better and makes more sense?" And for the almost universal answer to be "we do it that way in "

Not frustrated at you, frustrated at the US

I’ve seen them buried in some hurricane prone areas here but not many of them. I don’t think they’d need to bury most of the high voltage lines as those are easy to maintain above ground but there are a lot of disaster prone areas that could benefit from residential power being buried locally

So yes we’d need to be smart about choosing the appropriate places for it but nearly all the places that could use it dont because $$

Everywhere. La fires were caused by sparking lines, previous fires as well. Ice storms knock out power anywhere, it makes sense to bury them when possible.

Nonsense. It's just about being cheaper.

It would save money in the long run though.

In some countries it's way more important that a few people can buy a third Yacht.

One point for above ground is that it is far easier to know when it’s damaged to the point of being unsafe for the general public and much simpler and quicker to repair. For underground, you don’t know that until there is a failure that causes outages or someone/something gets hurt.

While I have seen numerous downed power lines, I have not know anything actual hurt by them. On the other hand, I have known multiple dogs who’ve died stepping on top of electrified access points while out for walks. While this is purely anecdotal, it’s not black and white either.

Other underground utilities have more obvious failure signs to the public (smells, flooding, water damage etc) and generally have minimal short term consequences while electrical faults tend to go unnoticed until a significant failure event (i.e. power goes out or something gets killed). Our town has hundreds of reported natural gas leaks, that is take years to fix while pole repairs tend to happen within an hour of being reported with police standing by until the crew shows up.

I work for a Telco and most of our service interruptions are caused by fibre cuts, falling trees on poles, and ice or fire damage to aerial cables. Underground is just so much better.

It makes life harder on Spider-Man if you bury things.

storm damage.

First, underground lines will be flooded far sooner. Second, IF water were ever to reach the height of those lines you're right, everyone in the vicinity would be dead long before that happened.

Shielded and reinforced underground conduits my friend!

There is moisture above ground too and ground movement can affect the poles as well. I would think that there is more exposure to damages above ground with cars hitting them, tree limbs, strong winds, animals chewing through wires, etc. While it's easier to repair damages above ground I believe there would be less of them with buried lines.