Ender's Mom said:
YAY!
We really should invest in an updated power grid.
We're getting one. I'm not sure if my power is back on in Louisville, probably not since it took 5 days in September when the remnants of Ike blew through and the paper says 122,000 homes are still without power in Louisville. I was staying at a friends back home because they had power, now I'm at my parents since they got power last night. Many counties in western Kentucky have 0 power, the whole county is in the dark. A county to the south of us has so much damage that the entire grid basically has to be replaced. They're thinking all power will be restored in March! I can't imagine what I'd do living either without power or on a generator for that long. I have been impressed with the constant truck loads of generators that have been brought in - thousands arrive every day.
I've never seen anything like this (and neither have the folks that have been around for 70 or 80 years), no tree has been spared. From Wednesday through yesterday we worked from sunup to sundown doing nothing but clearing trees out of roads and yards. At night, we've been transporting supplies down to areas harder hit than us. Some areas not only lack electricity, they don't even have water because there is a shortage of generators with enough capacity to operate the water pumps. Also, since people aren't using as much water since they're out of their homes or the pumps aren't working, the water mains are breaking since we've had a few nights that have dropped into the teens and single digits. Fortunately, schools are out and many employers closed so there is literally an army of volunteers to help in addition to the governor calling up every National Guard unit in the state.
The problem with burying the lines is that it's terribly expensive. This is a once in a lifetime event, so it's hard to convince people to pay that much more every month for something that probably won't happen again in their lifetime. Plus, you have to turn the power, cable, and telephones off to bury the line, and you have to bury it in a large enough pipe that workers can access when the line eventually deteriorates - at least the main lines. They do bury most utilities in new construction now, especially in wooded areas, but I'm not sure they'll ever bury everything. It may be something they can do over a period of decades. I don't think it's an option now because right now the focus is getting power back as soon as possible and it would just take too long to bury everything that's down right now.
