Down in the Hole

To contact us Click HERE

Our recent weather event has once again raised cries forburying all power lines. Even here at To2C, readers have chimed in on theissue.

It has also again highlighted the longstanding Columbia/Ellicott City divide. In some recent casual conversations I've detected a hint of  an infrastructuresuperiority complex among some Columbians. Columbia,of course, was a pioneer in the burying of power lines forty five years ago. As a result, Columbia in general, sufferedfewer power outages than the rest of HoCo, percentage wise anyway.
That being said, there were still power outages in Columbia. The infrastructureis only as strong as its weakest point which occurs in and all around Columbia. This is alsotrue in Ellicott City. In the newerdevelopments, including my own neighborhood, all of the power lines are buried.The problem is that they are connected to the old parts where the wires arehung on poles, the aforementioned weak link. In Ellicott City the old parts occupy a larger geographical area than the new parts.
 Whether or not tojust go ahead and bury everything everywhere has been battered around for some time now. Accordingto this story by Mike DeBonis in The WashingtonPost, “In 2005, the Maryland Public Service Commission studied whether creatinga statewide system of underground lines would be wise. The group concluded thatbuilding such a system would be too expensive, …”
There also seems to be a question as to whether it is even worthit.
“A 2009 report from the Edison Electric Institute, a tradeassociation for public utilities, said data show that underground systems have“only a slightly better reliability performance” than above-ground systems.”
Then again, if you just measured the performance ofunderground power lines in times of storms like last Fridays, putting the power in the hole winshands down.
“Pepco said in a 2008 report that outages involving overheadwires took 2.8 hours to repair, while the average outage involving undergroundequipment took 4.4 hours. But during and after storm events, the calculationchanged: Above-ground equipment took an average of 8.2 hours to repair, “whilethere were no [underground] storm related failures for comparison.”
And then there’s that…