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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

To be somewhat fair to PSE, it's generally simpler to plan for wind and ice than falling trees, which the Indiana plains relatively lack. As a proponent of "if the trees are such a problem why not bury the lines" who has since had to dig some trenches in the hellish rocky clay of King County, I am somewhat more sympathetic to their plight.

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I don't buy it. Maine has small power faults attributed to falling trees, but it's usually limited to only a few residents at a time because they PROACTIVELY trim problem trees and build a redundant system that can route around a downed line. We also have ice storms every year and after many people died from it in the 90s we decided to stop that from being a problem too. The fact is, it's not hard or expensive to make a reliable network when you charge 30 cents per kWh, hell, CMP was building around ice storms and occasional windstorms and all those other problems we experience for 6 cents per kWh until very recently! They basically replaced every line in the lower half of the state with that price

A reliable transmission grid does not require burying cables! It requires engineering and fault analysis and proactive spending and caring about your customers. If your distributor doesn't have reliable infrastructure, it's not because they can't afford it, it's because they don't care and don't have to fear losing you as a customer.

Maine's trees are tiny compared to the PNW. Most of them would hardly graze the line if they fell over.

It's really difficult to prune, say, 50 miles of Douglas-fir that stands easily over 150-200ft and grows right next to the lines -- many of their limbs are fatter than any tree I saw in the northeast. You'd have to get a crane and block the road off, and one tree could take a good part of a day. Can't fell them either, generally speaking, as you get into all sorts of disputes and the environmentalists will send you to hell 50 different ways with lawsuits.

If the fir stands 150ft high right next to your power line, you have failed to proactively prune it.

Well the tree was there a few centuries before the line was. And like I said, it's impractical to fall them.

That is, it was impractical to fell them while building the line initially? The risk was considered too low for the cost of cutting and towing away large trees in a wide enough corridor?

The lines and paved road got put in during the old days of logging, I'd assume it was considered financially impractical for a number of reasons, likely from a legal perspective, due to many private property owners, along with a mixed bag of county, state and federally-owned land sprinkled in there, for a town of around 100 people or so. Things just kind of went along from there.

Nowadays it's all that plus environmental lawsuits.

The main contributor to falling trees in the Pacific Northwest is that trees can grow quite large while having relatively shallow roots because of the ready availability of water near the surface.

PSE isn't charging 30 cents per kWh either.

Redmond can probably get redundancy, but a lot of the Sound area really doesn't have multiple routes available. If a line goes down in Gorst, it impacts a lot of people. Undergrounding is very expensive, and unless it's absolutely required, the utility comission doesn't let PSE do it unilaterally and charge to all ratepayers, it has to be approved and paid for by the affected ratepayers, but most people aren't willing to pay for it. It also isn't a panacea; underground wiring still breaks from time to time, and time to resolution is much longer; plus there's a bigger disruption during installation and new connections to underground utilities are way more expensive than connecting to above ground utilities. There's a lot of new connections as there's lots of new housing, so that's a bigger factor than a more established area.

Just because relatively few residents are affected by each outage does not mean CMP is particularly reliable outside of urban centers. Within the bounds of "major" metropolitan areas (by Maine standards) a number of multi-day and sometimes week-long outages have occurred in the last 5-10 years. It's always trees on ridgelines falling onto powerlines, often in the same places. Burying them would absolutely improve reliability. As it stands, everyone in these areas who can afford it _has_ to have a generator, since their water (well) and sewer (septic system or pumps to a city system) requires electrical power.

it's more to do with the limbs on the large trees. they're all problems. just like how in the first big thunderstorm in the midwest you get a lot of treefall.. and that tornado every 30 years takes out everything.

> As a proponent of "if the trees are such a problem why not bury the lines"

I really don't like the concept of burying your infrastructure.

The problem is that once you've done it, you can never change the system. You're stuck with whatever you have until the gulf between what you have and what you want is so vast that it makes sense to install a new system from scratch.

Burying the lines is great, if you're confident you won't want to make any changes for the next 100 years.

No, you make a perfectly valid point. Not too many corn stalks are going to fall on power lines in Indiana. Though one year there was an ice storm so bad, the accumulated ice pulled the high tension towers/pylons to the ground in crumpled heaps. That took a little while to restore power.

As it happens, I live in King County, but in an area serviced by a suburban (former rural) electric co-op. Plenty of falling trees here, as well. But we consistently have fewer blackouts every year than my friends in Redmond and Bellevue.

The east side has lots of blackouts (I WFH with many, and they will go OOF a lot during wind storms), mainly Kirkland, Bellevue, Redmond. Oddly enough, they have a lot of buried lines as well, at least more than we do in Seattle, and here in Ballard we don’t have outages nearly as much as they do. Maybe we simply don’t have as many trees over here?

I'm in North Bend. Having previously lived in Redmond and then Bellevue, I'd say there's a lot more trees here.

It's not even just the cost of digging. The cost of the design and the cables is also way more expensive. The wires hung on poles aren't even insulated, while buried cable needs some pretty fancy cabling (lots of insulation, lots of armoring, etc)

I lived in the Redmond area and I also lived in Northern BC - and despite all the bad storms and ice of Northern BC - I never had power loss for more than 8 hours. It was a lot worse in the Redmond area and owning a generator was pretty valuable.

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