Wednesday, October 09, 2019
Underground came first
Avista is bringing back power to the area where the icestorm was worst. At first 30k houses were dark. As of 8PM, just 16 hours after the storm, 20k houses are back on.
This is considerably faster than previous storms, probably because the affected area is rich. Shareholders and politicians live there, not just Negative Externalities.
Downtown never loses power from storms, because the wiring downtown is underground. Other hi-tech countries have placed all urban wiring underground.
One of the Spokane News commenters made this point harshly.
The money spent on repeated repairs to overhead wires has unquestionably exceeded the cost of putting everything underground. Avista missed a chance to do it cheaply 20 years ago when they added natural gas service to parts of Spokane. Since they were trenching already, they could have moved the wires into the trenches at the same time.
Underground wiring was the FIRST idea of early telegraph inventors, and they developed the technology of troughs and encased cables BEFORE they developed poles and insulators. They had it right from the start.
¶ 11:06 PM 
