It is time to bury utility wires

The 1910 Civic Improvement Plan for New Haven (Olmstead & Gilbert) recommended that the overhead power lines be undergrounded starting at the center of the city and then over time move outward. It is now 2018, and we just have a small part of the downtown free of overhead wires in New Haven, and not much better in other Connecticut towns and cities. Thomas Edison’s early power networks in Manhattan were all underground in the 1890s . The tangle of wires that now obliterates the sky, makes firefighting and adjacent construction activity more difficult and hazardous, has also justified a neverending war on our trees.

Due to weather events, crashes from vehicles, normal weathering and age, this system is intrinsically unreliable, expensive to maintain, and well outside of any definition of resilience. The utilities have a public relations firewall against undergrounding unless somebody else pays for it. We have allowed this degradation of our public space while these very utilities have made billions in profit in the preceding decades. They spend hundreds of millions on tree trimming and removals, and also for the massive repairs required by extreme weather events such as we are now experiencing.

The recent tornados have broken more than 2000 utility poles and is requiring the replacement of over 300 miles of wiring. Hundreds of thousands of households and businesses have been dark, resulting in lost revenue, lost school days, spoiled food, health emergencies, and other related difficulties. The clean-up of public roads, which is essential for health and safety, in made exponentially more difficult because the downed trees are tangled up with power lines, which have to be removed first.

It is time to change this paradigm with new state regulatory legislation. Let’s divert existing resources to a 50- to 100-year plan to systematically replace our overhead wiring with a truly resilient underground system. Let Connecticut be a leader in resilience; rather than costing us, it will be more economical in the long run. Let’s start planning for the long term, and not just fix the current damage to put the lights back on for today.

Henry Dynia Hamden