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But when they’re buried they require access FAR less frequently. In cities with buried power lines, power loss pretty much only occurs when the entire grid is u

But when they’re buried they require access FAR less frequently. In cities with buried power lines, power loss pretty much only occurs when the entire grid is undersupplied or goes down entirely like in the 2003 blackout. And those situations don’t require access to the buried lines. My city has areas with both buried and above-ground lines, and the above-ground areas see a week or two without power every year or so. Living in the buried-line areas, I haven’t seen an outage since ‘03. There’s one area of the city with buried lines that lost power a while back —- when an entire power plant went offline due to a bad storm. And again, they didn’t have to tear up the streets to fix that.

Fatnino 3y ago
Palo Alto is like this. Northern, wealthier, part of the city got all the power lines put underground and then the money for the program "ran out" before they could get around to doing it for the southern, slightly less affluent, areas. Never mind that the whole city paid in to the program. Oh well that just how it goes. So now, in 2024,the power still flickers every time the wind blows and goes down at least an hour a year. And yet, despite all the money pumped into the northern part of the grid, there is still only one connection to the national grid and it's right under the flight path of the airport where a plane already crashed into it once. Whole city, north and south, had no power for 12-ish hours.