Morning Poll: Should power lines be moved underground? - ARLnow
Morning Poll: Should power lines be moved underground? | ARLnow.com
After big storms, many of the same questions are asked: namely, why don’t we just bury power lines?
Surely the expense of constantly fixing power lines downed by falling trees, branches and the occasional crash— both in terms of the repairs themselves, lost productivity, etc. — cannot be far off from the cost of just moving them underground?
As our exploration of the topic last week found, however, it’s not quite that simple. It would cost tens of billions of dollars to bury lines across the state, and previous looks at the question specifically in Arlington also concluded that it’s infeasible from both a cost and a permissions perspective — getting everyone to agree to let the power company dig up their yards.
Instead, Dominion and local governments have been conducting more targeted undergroundings, along high-density corridors like Columbia Pike and in places where storm damage is more frequent. That has cut the power restoration time after big storms, a Dominion spokeswoman told us, but outages will remain a fact of life as long as there are storms and trees.
Of course, there are likely those that would argue that with climate change whipping up fiercer storms, burying more lines should be more seriously considered.
Where do you stand?
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