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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Here in Germany we bury everything. I don't even want to imagine how long it takes to rebuild all of that when some drunkard crashes his car into one of these poles or a lightning strike hits.

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I grew up in the Florida Keys where the water table is very close to the surface so it's impossible to bury anything. When I was a young teenager, we would lose electricity all the time from tree branches brushing up against the power lines. They finally solved the problem by putting in power lines on concrete poles that are a few stories up! No more squirrels and tree branches disputing power!

A lot less time than when an earthquake snaps an underground cable.

you'd be surprised but it takes quite an impact to disrupt a telephone pole. most crashes leave the pole standing (see examples online), and even when it does topple the wires seem to hold, and the utility company comes in with a fresh pole. the lightning strike factor does suck if you live very very close to the strike and nothing is surge protected. That happened to my house once and fried my xbox and router.

I've seen it happen personally, except it was the support cable to a pole with a transformer. Cable anchor came out of the dirt, pole fell over, sparks everywhere, transformer fluid all over the street, hazmat cleanup crew, big mess.

I could be wrong, but I'd worry about earthquakes severing the lines.

This map[0] shows the major faults, but each one of those is a lot of small minor faults that all could snap things and shift. One small fault right by where I grew up is about three blocks long. Last I checked had one earthquake to its name: a magnitude 5.0 aftershock of Loma Prieta

[0] https://usgs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id...

Here in Japan, there's full of pole except a few tourist spot, recovery after car accident, earthquake or heavy rain is done immediately.

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