Underground power: warm up to the idea

Published 7:00 am Wednesday, December 20, 2006

When’s the last time a power line was knocked down by a falling building?

The question is admittedly absurd – when overhead lines are brought to earth, the culprits are invariably falling trees. And yet, what’s the next Bainbridge street likely to see its power lines put underground? Winslow Way.

For the second time in 10 months, a violent windstorm plunged the island into protracted darkness. Downtown commerce shuddered to a halt, home-based ventures stalled, and families young and old were sent scrambling to find warmth. While utility crews put in valiant hours replacing lines reduced to tangled ruin, some neighborhoods were still without power Tuesday morning as the thermometer hovered in the low 30s.

Not so long ago, our community aspired to better. Among the policies written into the Utilities Element of the Comprehensive Plan, you’ll find this: “The city shall encourage undergrounding of all existing utility lines in residential areas, by the utility providers. The city shall cooperate with the formation of local improvement districts (LIDs) to underground existing lines.”

Yet after identifying reliable underground power as a goal, our city leaders and elected officials promptly forgot about it. True, lines to new subdivisions are put underground, and wires are often buried when the city does other work in an area. On Ericksen Avenue, utility undergrounding was piggy-backed onto a sidewalk project, while as noted above, when the reconstruction of Winslow Way finally begins, downtown power lines there will be tucked out of sight and mind.

But as far as undergrounding main lines elsewhere on the island, there’s no progress at all – even though the recent storm’s destruction was so maddeningly predictable.

Falling trees on Miller Road – where high-voltage lines run through a public forest – are an annual problem. Winds likewise brought down lines on other heavily treed corridors like Lynwood Center Road, Grand Avenue and the south side of New Brooklyn. Aggressive trimming by Puget Sound Energy only goes so far; when tall trees topple, power lines go with them.

One city official this week suggested that undergrounding never quite rises to the top tier of priorities for city spending, lately crowded out by open space and bike/ped projects. Undergrounding the entire island isn’t practical, nor can Bainbridge ever truly isolate itself from storm damage to transmission lines elsewhere.

But we could do a lot more to mitigate local problems, and contain outages to neighborhoods instead of whole swaths of the island. The city could sit down with Puget Sound Energy to identify main distribution lines, come up with a cost estimate to bury those lines, then dedicate some city funding or spread the cost among residents through LIDs or across the local ratepayer base. We suspect islanders would gladly pay for better reliability.

Those who’ve lived here more than a few years can recall when outages occurred with much greater frequency, and we’ve always found a way to get by. (This past weekend, even good church-going folk found themselves queued up for the buffet at the casino.)

We used to have a saying about Bainbridge’s seasonal outages: the first one’s romantic, the second one’s quaint, the third one’s a pain in the rear end.

These days, the scale just tips toward the latter.

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