Very very expensive. For fiber, though, it’s starting to make sense economically.
Why weren't telephone lines and electrical lines not buried under ground? Which would have saved a bunch of money from upkeep and accidents?
Submitted 3 hours ago by Patnou@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
gastroglizzy@piefed.social 3 hours ago
Ask New York City. It’s expensive af every time a change needs to be made underground. In many places it’s easier to let the damage happen and repair it cheaply.
obviouspornalt@fedinsfw.app 1 hour ago
fiber optics solve most of this for comms. clearly doesn’t help for electricity.
Hegar@fedia.io 2 hours ago
In australia buried lines are fairly common. It's more expense and harder to do maintainence, but it's also way better and safer.
skribe@piefed.social 1 hour ago
Perth started burying their lines in the 90s. It was supposed to take 30 years. Last I heard, they’re about half done.
Hegar@fedia.io 1 hour ago
Yeah i was in high school in perth in the 90s so i remember poles disappearing.
Perth has expanded massively in the last 10-15 years, i'm not surprised initial estimates were way off. Or even less surprised than normal since i believe every single infrastructure project in history has been late and overbudget.
MyDogLovesMe@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Bet the power stays on more during storms and shit as well.
Poles get knocked over, struck by lightning, trees, blah blah.
radiofreebc@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
In the city i live in (Victoria, BC) the wealthiest part of town has buried lines. Everywhere else, they’re on poles.
GreenBeard@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
There’s 3 answers.
- It’s shitty to maintain underground wiring and it’s shitty to trench it in the first place, so while you are saving money in the long run, you’re paying upfront to run it and your routine maintenance costs are higher in short bursts instead of lower cost per issue, but a lot more issues. This makes people angry the money line didn’t go up enough that month and now you’re fired… even though you saved them money in the long run.
- You can’t run it very far underground. I won’t get into the physics, but suffice it to say, running power underground tends to be “leaky”, and it will bleed away very quickly over relatively short distances.
- Sunk Costs. Tech for trenching and boring has gotten a lot better, it costs less to do than it did 100 years ago, but moving the lines now and tearing down the old ones would cost money upfront and no one wants to pay for that.
K1nsey6@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
The poors get overhead lines, the wealthy get underground
naught101@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
In Australia our power lines are mostly aerial, but telephone/broadband lines are mostly underground.
einkorn@feddit.org 3 hours ago
Which would have saved a bunch of money from upkeep and accidents?
That’s highly debatable. Putting something in the ground instead of the air just adds a different set of factors eating away at the cables. Accidents happen underground as well as above. Excavators or farming equipment regularly cut cables buried in fields or at construction sites. The deeper you bury cables to avoid that the higher the cost gets. Also maintaining a network of buried cables has its own problems: Want to know where an overland power line was cut? Just look where the cable dropped. Want to know where a buried line broke? Start digging up the whole strand between the two transfer points.
Overall: Overland lines are cheaper and easier to maintain.
theneverfox@pawb.social 3 hours ago
We used to insulate cables with basically waxy paper, not exactly the most waterproof of materials, and if you want to bury lines long term you need to enclose the sections in some kind of corrosion resistant waterproof pipe so you don’t have to dig them up completely every time you need to do maintenance
So this really wasn’t a practical option until petrochemicals came onto the scene, but also the improvements to metallurgy and grid technology were probably necessary to really make this feasible
Imagine trying to track down shorts underground constantly…
hperrin@lemmy.ca 58 minutes ago
That’s not exactly true. The first undersea transatlantic cable was laid in 1854, well before petrochemical coatings. Admittedly, it didn’t last long. But the third cable in 1866 did last quite a while.
The cables were coated in gutta-percha.
CMDR_Horn@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
$$$
bitteroldcoot@piefed.social 2 hours ago
In areas prone to severe weather they tend to get buried.
Especially after multiple event trash pole mounted ones.
I use to live in Huntsville Alabama. Between the tornadoes and ice storms Huntsville utilities just gave up and started burying them.
adespoton@lemmy.ca 49 minutes ago
I’ve lived in areas where they aren’t underground BECAUSE of potential severe weather. The powerlines run through miles of wilderness and are serviced by helicopter. Which doesn’t come out when the weather’s bad. But if they were buried (which would be massively more expensive) they’d tear up lots of wilderness and flood/break regularly due to soil movement and tree growth.
Plus, running conduit through rock is a lot harder than drilling a few holes to mount a pole.
Where I am now? It’s all in conduit under the street beside the storm drains, except where there hasn’t been new development to pay for it. Seems like they have to service the conduits a lot more than the poles though, and fixing a pole line stays out of the way of traffic and takes a couple of minutes, where fixing underground shorts involves blocking off a lane, snaking the cables, and bringing in specialists — takes up to 3 hours for a similar repair.
sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 2 hours ago
Where I am, way cheaper for upkeep to have on poles. Some jackass is trying to force my entire neighborhood to underground our power lines for no reason other than aesthetics and they say it’ll cost the average homeowner here $50k each. If it goes through I’m thinking of Molotov cocktailing the fucker’s house.
LovableBastard@slrpnk.net 3 hours ago
There are probably lots of different reasons. But they will all boil down to whether it really made financial sense in the long run.
In my area there’s a lot of rock. So burying lines can have a much higher expense even in the long run.
And I’ve also lived in some areas with a lot of hills/mountains. Burying lines in areas like that means you need a lot more line than if you just stretched it between poles or towers over the valleys.
HootinNHollerin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 hours ago
My street is the only one in my area that has buried lines. I suspect because a politician lives on it as well
someguy3@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Before hydraulics digging was hard AF.
seat6@lemmy.zip 3 hours ago
In addition to being higher cost, buried lines aren’t great for long distance, high power transmission. That’s part of the reason off-shore wind uses high voltage DC rather than AC power
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
This is just a guess, but I think it might be because not everyone needed or had a phone at first.
They only connected a few important buildings at first, and then started tying in more. If they had started underground, they’d have to dig up the streets every time someone bought their first telephone.
Ellvix@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
That’s exactly what’s happening where I am. Wildfire danger is so high they have to shut down city power every time there’s serious wind, as there aren’t enough fire services to cover all the potential fires from downed lines. Now a good chunk of tax dollars are going to moving lines underground, though arguably it’ll take some time.
IWW4@lemmy.zip 3 hours ago
It is expensive as hell to bury anf maintain.
echodot@feddit.uk 48 minutes ago
Because then all the phone calls would have sounded muffled.