In australia buried lines are fairly common. It's more expense and harder to do maintainence, but it's also way better and safer.
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 2 weeks ago by Patnou@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
Hegar@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
skribe@piefed.social 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago
Bet the power stays on more during storms and shit as well.
Poles get knocked over, struck by lightning, trees, blah blah.
cdnk5@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
Where I live, ground settling causes problems with utilities. Gas company had to come last week to redo line to my house because it had dropped a foot.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Because then all the phone calls would have sounded muffled.
0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Couldn’t you just yell a little louder into the phone to make up for it?
Aeao@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You’re thinking of “two quite” which can be solved with louder speech. Muffled remains unclear regardless of volume.
Sheldan@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
More expensive to build. That doesn’t get offset by accidents and whatever. Also harder to repair in case something really is broken with it.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Very very expensive. For fiber, though, it’s starting to make sense economically.
Yaky@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
In addition to cost (as everyone else said), work and worker qualifications. Working on underground lines requires special confined spaces training and certification, because it is more dangerous, could deal with not just electricity, but potentially hight temperatures, water, sewage, toxic gas, lack of oxygen, etc. There are even fewer people willing to do that compared to riding a bucket to the overhead lines.
Source: Worked for electrical utility
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
radiofreebc@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago
The poors get overhead lines, the wealthy get underground
CMDR_Horn@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
$$$
JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Some unprepared countries tried this, in an effort to modernize. Without interdeparrment communication, good documentation, coordination, signage and, well, maps that included depth data that are maintained and updated in real time, yould have frequent outages each time one works department or private contractor did some digging in an inocuous patch.
Source: am malaysian.
bitteroldcoot@piefed.social 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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.
theneverfox@pawb.social 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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.
theneverfox@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
That’s interesting, but also a special case. Those were specifically underwater cables, they needed to be kept wet
And even after we created rubber, we definitely did not coat normal cables in rubber, ever since the properties of latex were discovered we’ve basically never had enough to fully meet the demand. Rubber is really useful for all sorts of things, and latex trees take a decade to start producing and only produce for another couple decades. Discovering alternatives using petrochemicals was a really big deal because of that
My point stands… The wires we used for early electricity and telephone transmission had minimal insulation, if any at all. Definitely nothing suitable to use underground until much later. Here’s a breakdown of the time frames for insulation (and note that cost was a significant part of the decision, even today we don’t use weather proof insulation unless the situation calls for it)
In the 1880’s the first insulated cables were insulated with gutta percha, a natural latex material produced from the sap of trees of the same name. This insulation needed to be kept constantly wet or it would dry out and fail to insulate the conductors. This material was largely replaced by rubber and vulcanised bitumen.
By the 1890’s mass impregnated paper insulation was being used on cables and voltages as high as 10kV.
In 1906 armoured cables were introduced which had flexible sheathing and two cloth covered, rubber insulated conductors.
In the 1930’s the first trials with PVC insulations were being made in Germany and by the end of the second world war there were significant varieties of synthetic rubbers and polyethylene.
By the 1950’s PVC was commercially viable and replaced rubber cables in many areas particularly in domestic wiring, aluminium was also starting to be used widely as an alternative conductor
The 1970’s heralded XLPE insulations replacing paper insulated cables in medium voltage applications.
In the 1980’s optical fibres were being introduced in overhead lines for data transmission and condition monitoring, and further use of XLPE in high voltage transmission lines between 66 and 240kV. Also high temperature super conductivity materials were discovered. PVC alternatives (LSZH cables) which were safer in fires were being developed in response to a number of tragic public fires which demonstrated the dangers of smoke and toxic gases from various materials including PVC’s.
By the 1990’s polymers were being extended to use in EHV, extra high voltage, applications and the use of optical fibres in overhead lines was becoming widespread.
Corporal_Punishment@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
They are in lots of places. Most British villages/towns/cities all utilities are now underground. Its quite rare to see low voltage powerless now
einkorn@feddit.org 2 weeks 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.
musicalphysics@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
There are devices that will measure how far away a break in a cable is.
Treczoks@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Don’t know why they don’t this in your place. Here, power, phone, fiber, everything is underground for years now.
Tywele@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Except high voltage lines everything is underground here in Germany.
LovableBastard@slrpnk.net 2 weeks 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.
sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks 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.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
do it anyway just to send the message.
someguy3@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Before hydraulics digging was hard AF.
HootinNHollerin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
My street is the only one in my area that has buried lines. I suspect because a politician lives on it as well
HeHoXa@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Telephone… lines? They’re wireless, duh. /s
As a kid there was a big exciting (to me through my parents’ eyes) movement to put our neighborhood power lines underground, but they fk’ed it up somehow and power started going out so often we got a generator.
I want to say it was some issue with the water table? Poorly protected? Too low? Whenever a big rain would come they’d flood and cut off? I might be making that part up, kid memories.
I’m sure that has a lot to do with the incopetents that managed it and little to fo with underground cables in general.
GatesMcBalmer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Why weren’t telephone lines and electrical lines not buried under ground?
I guess Dickle has no time for proofreading because need to post 10 times a day
BeelzebubEiNukuKoskaan@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Where I am from, they’ve been doing that for a few decades now. We get snow and windy autumns, so trees fall on the lines, snapping them, leaving tens of thousands without electricity. Also the snow packs on the branches of the trees, making them either snap or just sort of lean on the power lines, snapping them, leaving tens of thousands without electricity in -25C degree weather.
naught101@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
In Australia our power lines are mostly aerial, but telephone/broadband lines are mostly underground.
seat6@lemmy.zip 2 weeks 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
IWW4@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
It is expensive as hell to bury anf maintain.
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
they have been here in sweden, only high-voltage lines remain aboveground (with much much more robust infrastructure) and the odd teensy weensy rural line that probably isn’t even active any more and remains simply because no one cares enough to dismantle it.
gastroglizzy@piefed.social 2 weeks 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.
BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yet in London, power lines are buried, alongside gas and water supplies and most of the telephony network.
Its a choice about what cost is acxeptable for the long term benefits of protection from the elements and safety generally. It costs more upfront, but extends the lifespan of cables as theyre protected from temperatures, UV, fainfall, and falling tree branches.
When they do need repair / replacement it requires digging but theyre generally subsurface, and many utilities are under pavements or to one side of the road, allowing roads to be kept partially open. But they generally require repair less frequently than exposed cabling.
obviouspornalt@fedinsfw.app 2 weeks ago
fiber optics solve most of this for comms. clearly doesn’t help for electricity.