Above-Ground Power Lines Grow In Risk As Climate Changes

Trees toppling onto above-ground power lines spark wildfires, more than 1,000 of them in the last decade in California alone. The wires snap-in blizzards and hurricanes, causing dayslong outages. Everywhere, power poles topple in all kinds of disasters, blocking escape routes.

Around the U.S., dealing with the vulnerability of overhead power lines — one of many problems that experts say will only get worse as the climate deteriorates — by burying them or strengthening them is spotty and disorganized on a national level, and painfully slow, at best.

Utilities say there’s no one best way to safeguard the millions of miles of U.S. power lines and that doing so would cost many billions of dollars — $3 million for a single mile of power lines by some estimates. Critics counter by pointing to the at least equally great economic costs of outages and utility-sparked wildfires. Estimated property losses for a single such wildfire, a California blaze that killed 85 last year, reached $16.5 billion.

Overall, electrical outages caused by bad weather cost the U.S. economy up to $33 billion in an average year — and more, in an especially bad weather year, the Energy Department estimated in 2013. The researchers estimated there were 679 widespread outages from harsh weather between 2003 and 2012.

After electrical wires sparked many of California’s major wildfires in 2017 and 2018, and threatened more this autumn, many there turned their fear and anger on PG&E, the state’s largest investor-owned utility.

Vicki McCaslin, a 60-year-old repeat evacuee in the San Francisco Bay area, described spotting a PG&E worker in her neighborhood during a lull in last month’s wind and fires.

McCaslin burst into tears as she begged the utility worker to cut off power to her area before the winds and wildfires resumed, she recounted. “It scares me to death to think of those kinds of winds with our power on.”

Nationally, experts say, problems with 19th century-style set-ups of wires dangling from wooden poles will only grow as climate change increases the severity and frequency of hurricanes, wildfires, big snowstorms and other disasters like tornados.