Hacker News Reader

Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

I hear in Japan the reason they have electric wires on poles and houses have individual gas cylinders is to provide resiliency during earthquakes -- the earth becomes a liquid.

View on HN

Electric wires on poles are also more likely to get damaged by wind, ice, fire, and flood, either directly or by trees falling onto them. There are tradeoffs involved.

They're also much cheaper to construct.

Getting OT but I've noticed in Scandinavian countries they use pavers a lot where in the USA we'd more likely have poured concrete or asphalt/tarmac. Sidewalks, parking surfaces, driveways, etc.

Pavers would seem to me to be both more expensive to install and require higher maintenance. Is there a reason they are used so much?

For the uk readers: I'm guessing 'pavers' are 'flags', or 'flagstones'.

Humped a few of them in my time...thank goodness for Atari, and all that followed.!!

They're called pavers, or block paving, or monoblock in the UK. Flagstones are big slabs of stone.

There are machines that are super fast at laying them. And digging them up and replacing them is a lot less disruptive than asphalt. Plus it makes cars drive a bit slower. And they drain naturally

Purely a guess on my part: concrete or asphalt will be destroyed by frost heave[1] and be difficult to patch well, while pavers will endure it better and are easier to restore.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_heaving

We have electric wires on poles in the northeast US, too—largely because the ground freezes solid for several months of the year.

It's not that unusual a precaution.

(Though yes, as a sibling commenter notes, we do have to deal with them getting taken down by wind, lightning, and the occasional hapless driver from time to time. There's no perfect solution.)

My guess is that it's more likely due to the cost of digging/right of way, etc. It gets significantly cold here in MN and most powerlines are underground, but we have a lot of open space.

A statistic I remember from when I lived there is that Connecticut has more trees per mile of powerline than any other state. Every time there was an ice storm, thousands of people lost power.

In Sweden power lines are buried, even in the very north of the country. I guess it's a cost thing.

That very much depends on which part of Sweden you're talking about. Around most cities they are buried but in the countryside 'luftledning' - literally 'air cable', denoting cabled hung on impregnated wooden poles - is still more the norm than the exception. Where I live (about 60 km north of Göteborg) Vattenfall has been talking about burying those cables for decades but they're still there and regularly are taken down by trees, errant drivers and similar mishaps.

Gases passing through dirt/sandy substances at high pressure will tend to do that.

See for example: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EImO4agHqOg

Very interesting! Now I have to think how this could be used to make something productive! :D Maybe some sort of special bearing floating on the fludized sand you can turn of and stop/stabilize by turning thr gas pipe off ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com