Dear President (elect) Obama

[question everything]

In addition to roads and bridges and light rail, how about investing in underground power lines?

This way, we can spare all the misery that so many communities are now suffering after their ice storms snapped power line. On ABC, a family is now on its Ninth!! Day without power!

No doubt, someone can calculate the cost benefit for such a project.

[TomInTib]

1. It can be extremely expensive.

Our Town decided to underground electricity, just for cosmetic purposes.

Then they passed the expense on to the homeowners.

And the costs just keep piling up. I think we are up to $28K per house, at present, with no end in sight.

[question everything]

2. Wow! This is expensive!

I have to wonder, though, if the project spread over wider area, if whole communities were part of it, whether the cost would be lower.

And, again, how much would it cost for a family to be out of power for nine days and counting?

[moriah]

3. Try two and a half weeks iced in in the mountains...

We lost our main electricity feed but didn't lose our water because we had the well pump running on solar and we had quite a few sunny but freezing days. We wired up another solar panel and battery to handle the propane heater.

Unfortunately we then ran out of propane.

I had the luck to catch pneumonia while we were iced in. Fortunately we had collected usnea so we were able to make an antibiotic tincture, and we also had some two-year-old lobelia seed/vinegar tincture. I was drunk for nearly two weeks because the usnea was tinctured in 1/2 pga 1/2 water, and then every few hours they made me wet my lips with the lobelia tincture and then swallow what got on my lips (it was strong stuff) and I would hack up a buncha crud.

The fever broke about four days before everything unfroze enough for me to get my car to pavement, and the doctor said he was surprised at the efficacy of the usnea for killing an infection.

[Sebastian Doyle]

4. My parents went 9 fucking days without power after an ice storm in 1997

Fortunately they had a wood stove for heat and they could cook on it, and they may have used the propane stove in the RV as well.

What's ridiculous is that they lived only about a mile out of town, while I lived way the hell out in the sticks at the time and was only out of power one night in the same storm.

They also lived about a mile away from the hospital (by actual distance) which naturally was one of the first priorities for the power company. But unfortunately, there's not any roads going directly from their neighborhood to the hospital, hence they were on a completely different power grid. And their power grid just happened to pass through an area where many trees, BIG trees went down. It took them that long just to be able to get the area cleaned up enough to reconnect the power lines.

Smart thing would have been to bury them THEN, especially since they wouldn't have been digging up anybody's front lawn in order to route the wires, at least for that stretch of road.

It's long overdue. Every part of the country is either subject to some form of extreme weather and/or earthquakes now and then. And the occasional idiot who runs his or her car into a pole and knocks it down. Though the squirrels in the neighborhood might be saddened to lose their own personal highway system and the crows would have to find a new place to sit and squawk at me, but they'll adapt, I guess.

[Hansel]

5. We have underground power lines and they are great.

Our power never goes out in a storm and it is a lot more aesthetically appealing. When I was a kid leaving just a mile from here where the lines were above ground, the power went out in nearly every big storm or every time a squirrel got in the transformers.

I think this is a great idea. Especially when power is out for days at a time in hot or cold climates. This is very dangerous for an aging population and expensive when food is destroyed.