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One of my former colleagues worked on disaster response in the northern Adirondacks and areas around the border. From his tales, it was pretty harrowing, basically bringing the region into circa 1880 technology overnight.

It was pre-911 before emergency response was well funded which made things more challenging. They were dealing with frozen everything, no power, no cellular, impassable roads, etc.

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And yet, to this day, power lines are still not put under ground in most of north america.

Sure that costs, but it saves your butt in times like these.

Power lines are not put under ground in most of the world. Nobody wants to pay an order of magnitude more to hedge against occasional downsides in reality.

Then "nobody" should be complaining about those downsides when they are freezing their butts off on winter days like these or when they yet again have to throw away all their freezer contents because an autumn storm blew the power lines in all of their neighborhood away. My Twitter feed has those complaints of friends-of-friends quite regularly.

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