Ooops, up again, great...

[Marcel Birgelen]

My admittedly fading memory of living in England is that the winters tended to go in ten years of mild ones, followed by one or two seriously cold December to February periods. During my early childhood in the late '70s there were a few very snowy winters in London, but the '80s winters were mainly mild. I hardly ever saw snow, except on visits to relatives up north. Then in 1991 came the infamous "wrong type of snow" winter in which the commuter rail system serving London literally froze up. Then more mild winters, but I remember 1999-2000 and 2000-01 as being colder than usual. More mild winters, and then during the 2010-11 winter, the temperature in my backyard in York went down to -18 Celsius, and the pipes froze. More mild winters, then my British relatives report that last winter and this one were very cold and snowy.

I think we were getting somewhat used to the mild kind of winters we experienced here over the last decade, which will only increase the impact when such an incident hits in the future. In the end, it always comes down to cost. You can completely winter-harden your infrastructure, but in the end nobody is really wanting to pay for it, at least not in regions where "it almost never happens".

I remember large parts of Germany and some parts of the Netherlands getting "the wrong kind of ice" about a year or 15 ago. Many power mainlines went down back then, causing long-lasting outages for some regions, because their pylons simply sagged under the load of ice that had build-up around them, due to foggy conditions combined with freezing temperatures. While it will certainly be possible to design infrastructure that avoids such icing buildup or can handle the load, those things were never considered when this infrastructure was put in place. While it's often easy to lay the blame somewhere, in reality, there are often multiple factors at hand, some of which might be genuinely unforeseen, others are just being factored within as an "acceptable scenario".

While Texas might be a prime example of how stuff can go wrong if you let some mighty corporations do their thing, it's not like those same things cannot happen anywhere else. Texas might be a somewhat unique scenario, with their own, pretty isolated power grid, but large, synchronized grids have also seen their failure modes.

[Jerry G. Axelsson]

Hello everybody,

Nice to see film-tech up and running again.

Take care and stay safe everyone!

[Leo Enticknap]

While it will certainly be possible to design infrastructure that avoids such icing buildup or can handle the load, those things were never considered when this infrastructure was put in place.

Running power and other utility cables underground is almost unheard of in the USA (at least, in the parts of it I'm familiar with) - almost all run on overhead poles. They are more susceptible to extreme weather, but quicker, easier, and cheaper to fix if they are damaged or destroyed. There was a debate about this in the aftermath of the Northern California fire that destroyed Paradise - would underground cables have prevented the fire from being started? Utility experts replied that the decision to stick with poles isn't simply not considering the risks, but rather the result of a cost/benefit equation that concluded that the increased cost of putting cables underground and maintaining them there isn't justified by the likely reliability and safety gain.

[Martin McCaffery]

I wouldn't go so far as "almost unheard of." The subdivision where my parents bought their house in 1971 has underground lines, as do many of the subdivisions in the Northern VA area built since then. I suspect that is the case at least in the richer suburbs around the country. Converting from overhead to underground lines is just not something many utility companies (or their customers) are willing to pay for, so overheads will stay in place until... forever?

[Marcel Birgelen]

When it comes down to overhead versus underground lines, research has shown that underground lines are almost always more reliable. The time to fix them, with modern tracing gear, usually isn't that much longer than with overhead lines either. Even in earthquake prone environments, underground infrastructure usually beats the overhead infrastructure. Top-heavy poles have a tendency to topple, blocking the road for emergency services or creating otherwise dangerous situations, especially if the power doesn't cut out.

The Netherlands is pretty unique in this situation, that there are practically no more overhead lines for anything but high-voltage main-lines and even some of those are being put underground. This in contrast to Belgium or Germany, where overhead infrastructure is still pretty common, especially in suburban areas. Putting those things underground adds a bit of quality of life, as it removes "industrial clutter" from your living space. Obviously, this isn't something any utility company is going to pay for willingly, so without the explicit requirement for putting those things underground, they'll always end up above ground, because it is simply much cheaper to do so.

Maybe, when someone is going to build a new road or is readying a new piece of land for some new urban development, with a bit of foresight, you could cheaply pre-install some duct-work into the streets, which then could be used by the utility companies to run their infrastructure through. But such a thing would require foresight, planning and co-operation. City planning is something most often done by politicians... the kind of guys that are seldomly known for their foresight, planning beyond their own interests and co-operation.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Running power and other utility cables underground is almost unheard of in the USA (at least, in the parts of it I'm familiar with) - almost all run on overhead poles. They are more susceptible to extreme weather, but quicker, easier, and cheaper to fix if they are damaged or destroyed. There was a debate about this in the aftermath of the Northern California fire that destroyed Paradise - would underground cables have prevented the fire from being started? Utility experts replied that the decision to stick with poles isn't simply not considering the risks, but rather the result of a cost/benefit equation that concluded that the increased cost of putting cables underground and maintaining them there isn't justified by the likely reliability and safety gain.

Actually, it is pretty common in Utah. I lived in two houses there over 21 years and both were fed from underground lines.But it is not at all common here in TN, but our power companies here seem to know how to install them so the power always stays on.

[Jim Cassedy]

When they were doing a lot of road-work & utility replacement in my San Francisco neighborhood a couple of years ago, the residents on my street were given the option of having the power lines moved underground. The reason there was not so much for weather, but for aesthetics. (Although I am very near the ocean, and the often damp salt-air takes its' toll on aerial cables & insulators. On foggy nights, it's not unusual to hear a crackling sound & see a corona discharge around the high-tension cables.) I think the property assessment to move the power lines came to about $7500 each, if we had all agreed to do it. As it is now, the power lines for my block are overhead on poles, but the phone & cable TV lines are underground. When I had standard DSL, it used to slow down horribly or crash entirely after a heavy rainfall. I have maps of all the underground telco cables in my neighborhood and the problem was in a small splice-chamber box in the sidewalk around the corner which became partly flooded in heavy rain. Trouble stopped when I got them to move my DSL circuit to another (dryer!) copper pair. Since then though, I've migrated to another service provider & now I've got a high-speed symmetrical GPON fiber connection for my phone & internet service that terminates right inside my apartment, and it works GREAT - - rain or shine!

In regards to putting utility lines underground, Mark G Said:

Actually, it is pretty common in Utah.

One of the film fests I regularly work is up in the mountains of Telluride, Colorado, where they get a LOT of snow in the winter. I've noticed when I've been there that all of their utilities are underground, and that all the fire hydrants and many of the underground utility boxes have brightly colored big metal "flags" attached above them so they can be easily located during the winter they're sometimes covered in snow drifts that can easily reach 4 or 5ft high sometimes.

TechTriva> I got my underground utility maps from a good friend at "the telephone company". Technically, he couldn't just give them to me without breaking company rules. So, one year, when we exchanged a couple of Christmas gifts, mine were wrapped not in holiday gift wrap, but in what appeared to be plain white paper, which he made sure to tell me to open very carefully, without ripping if possible. The carefully folded 'wrapping paper" actually had the maps printed on the other side. For the next year or two, all my birthday & Christmas gifts from him were wrapped the same way. In a couple of years, I had the complete set of maps for my area. (He's comfortably retired now, so I can tell the story safely)

[Randy Stankey]

When I had standard DSL, it used to slow down horribly or crash entirely after a heavy rainfall.

I once lived in a house where the Internet connection would go down when somebody flushed the toilet.

No joke!

The house was built in the 1960's. Decades before Al Gore invented the Internet.
In those days, when phone lines were installed, if you could talk to the guy on the other end of the line, you were good. Almost nobody thought anything about running (or AVOIDING) phone lines in proximity to electrical wiring. In fact, some considered it "smart" to run all the wiring, electrical and telephone, into the house in the same place. That's where the problem started. In the year 2000, things had changed.

Second... the house was in the country and didn't have municipal water service. Water came from an underground well.
And, as 1960's, Pennsyltucky, sensibilities would have it, the electrical lines to the well went... right across the phone line.s

Every time you flushed the toilet, the water tank was drained and the water pump turned on to refill it.
The sudden surge in the electrical line caused interference to the telephone line which clobbered the DSL signal, causing the Internet to crap out for about two minutes, until the water tank refilled and the pump shut off.

It didn't help that the three phones in the house, kitchen, bedroom and basement/garage, were all wired in series.

It took a while to figure out what was wrong but, once I did, rewiring the phone lines to avoid power lines did the trick.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I'm happy that phone lines are consistently routed underground around here. Nowadays, with vectoring going on, the slightest disturbance will cause your connection to drop or dramatically reduce in speed, taking minutes if not hours to re-establish at the original speed.

I remember our VDSL dropping every few minutes when they were just digging up the cable to splice in a new connection. Luckily, it's just a backup line, the primary line being fiber. The nice thing about fiber is that it's completely inert against interference, at the very least against all the reasonable stuff you can throw at it. You also don't need to worry about an additional path for lightning to creep in. Which actually is another big thing: overhead lines are much more prone to lightning, both direct hits and induction. Years back we had a location in Belgium, which had a cable connection via an overhead line. The cable modem died twice in a three year period, both after a fierce lightning storm...

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Internet is something that for me has always come from underground. My first copper DSL in Illinois was buried cable and my current fiber connection is from underground. It is one thing they are good at burying here in TN too. I see entire neighborhoods being converted to fiber with large crews out attacking the job.

[Mike Blakesley]

The neighborhood we live in has underground power lines, but most of the rest of our town does not. I think it's because this was a privately developed subdivision, so the developer decided early on to do the underground thing.

Several years ago the city was planning to 'upgrade' our area with new streetlights, and as part of the deal they were going to run those wires overhead, but the residents out here such a stink about it that they kept the underground lines for the lights.

The downtown area was not so lucky. We had underground streetlight wires for decades, until the city turned over maintenance of them to the local utility company, and part of their deal was they replaced the undreground with above-ground wires. So now my theatre has a very ugly cable running in front of it above the marquee, which serves to ruin all the pictures that are taken of our place on pleasant evenings.

[Marcel Birgelen]

It's interesting that they weren't able to re-use the existing underground power lines for their new street lights... Then again, you can hear the arguments already: It's old infrastructure, it wasn't installed by us, so we can't support it and we want to place the street lights differently...

[Mike Blakesley]

Yep, they said all of those except possibly the last one.

[Bobby Henderson]

Running power and other utility cables underground is almost unheard of in the USA (at least, in the parts of it I'm familiar with) - almost all run on overhead poles. They are more susceptible to extreme weather, but quicker, easier, and cheaper to fix if they are damaged or destroyed.

Lots of newer residential housing developments and newer commercial/retail districts typically feature most of the utilities being buried underground. This is certainly visible in some of the upper middle class and upper class suburbs in metros like Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Colorado Springs, etc.

One of the things driving this trend is neighborhood beautification. Columns of wooden power poles and overhead lines snaking all over the place really do create a lot of visual clutter. One thing I don't especially like about many of these newer retail districts is the townships often adopt sweeping anti-signs ordinances. They greatly limit what businesses can install near the street or even on their own buildings to identify themselves. They'll be reduced to some little tombstone-size monument size by the street and maybe one or two tiny channel letter signs on the building. To top it off the township will go totally nuts planting all kinds of bushes and trees along the streets. It's all about beautification, but it does a great job of obstructing the view of businesses. Overall this crap does a good job of driving more customers to buy their crap from Amazon rather than from a local business.

Here in Lawton much of the town looks like a throw-back to the 1980's. Most of the main streets have lots of utility poles all over the place. It's rare for any of the power lines to be buried under ground. In my own neighborhood our power lines are buried. But we still have utility poles along what passes for an easement in the back yards. Basically all the back yard fences were built right up next to each other over the easement. That's due to piss poor urban planning and lack of enforcement of local building codes. With that condition in place nuisance weed trees grew up between the fences up into the utility lines. Any severe weather would wreak havoc on those lines due to tree limbs slapping the crap out of them. Cable TV/Internet lines and DSL/POTS lines are still on those poles today. Early in 2010 we had an absolutely horrible ice storm. Power to my neighborhood was gone for almost a whole week. My own house got burglarized the last night my house was without power. AEP/PSO had such a horrible time dealing with this problem they came back and relocated all the power lines in the neighborhood. They buried them underground up under the front street curbs. We didn't have to pay anything extra for that. AEP/PSO had to visit this neighborhood frequently for any severe weather events. So burying the power lines was basically going to save them money in the long run.

[Leo Enticknap]

One of the things driving this trend is neighborhood beautification. Columns of wooden power poles and overhead lines snaking all over the place really do create a lot of visual clutter.

utilitypoles_NYC_1888.PNG

I see what you mean! New York City, 1888. The construction of utility poles was almost completely unregulated until that winter, when a linesman was electrocuted while repairing a low voltage telegraph cable, that had accidentally touched the failed insulation of a high voltage DC power line a few hundred yards away. That accident is alleged to have inspired the invention of the electric chair (source).

I guess earthquakes are another reason why underground utility lines are less popular in this part of the country. It would take a lot longer to repair a buried conduit than to put up new poles, I'd guess.