On a minor note, Delroy Lindo played an inventor eking out his eccentric existence, working on a subterranean ship that ends up saving the day in the otherwise megadumb disaster flick The Core. One of his inventions is some kinda of mega-laser that can casually carve tidy perfectly straight tunnels through just about anything except the ultrastrong metal Lindo has also invented. I remember thinking “What the hell are you doing out here in the desert, you dope? Patent those suckers and every city in the word will want them for large scale tunneling for new traffic, water and powerline routes without having to dig up the surface. Patent them and collect your Nobel and a billion dollars, already. Yeesh!”
In the UK virtually any settlement of any size has all of its services underground, except for telephones over the last run from the street distribution box to the dwelling.
Most of our high voltage power lines are overground, but in certain national parks etc, they are also underground.
There are recognised phonomenon such as cable creep, expecially alongside highways where road vibration will slowly stretch out cables, but we seem to have managed to deal with it.
Underground cables make for a much more reliable supply system, although the initial costs of installation are around 100X that of overhead lines, but once this is done, maintenance costs are so very much lower that it works out reasonably, but still more costly.
The problem as I see it is that the UK pwoer supply system, and all the other services were put there at public expense, these services were state industries, when they were first set up, largely in the 1930s through to the 1940’s, and they slowly evolved their codes fo practice so the underground is the norm.
Even though there utilities are now wholly in the company domain, and no longer nationally owned industries, they still work this way.
Whenever there is a serious power outage over here due to bad weather, there are always huge demands to change to underground cables, as its always ovehead lines that go down, and the arguments for and against are always along economic lines, but over time ost of the networks are slowly being put underground in a piecemeal way.
My power company had all burried cable and the area is a lot of wildlife refuges and hunting grounds. I didn’t have problems during storms to often. The proble was that the cables lasted about half their projected life, and couldn’t handel the new loads caused by housing density increasing ten fold. They had to run an expanded replacement program about four years. Now the long distance high tension lines put in by a different company run all across the landscape and make our utilie’s effort at keeping the area wire free a waste of money.
Here in Bogota, Colombia, most of the city still has poles and wires, but in the neighborhood where I live in the North of Bogota, all utilities are underground. This area is all highrise apartments and it makes more sense to have all utilities underground.
Its all about planning. Cities with good planning, a good horizon plan, can put underground power, DSL, Cable, all the other utilites and do it properly. And with good planning they can pull the old DSL lines out, when its time to upgrade easily.
OTOH, poor city planners have a nightmare keeping the existing facility running.
Its all about planning.
IAAUD (I am a Utility Designer) and much of my life revolves around this question. A huge issue to consider is the sheer bureauocracy of it all. My company actually participates in utility coordination meetings - the idea being that if one entity is going to be digging a trench for some reason, that the others can join in and share costs and it should be better for everyone. Great in theory. Call a meeting and invite representatives to discuss electric, water, gas, phone, cable, then throw in some folks from City/County/State (street rehab/extensions, plus sewer and and storm drain) and make a plan. Then you find out that the contractor for the City has bailed and the phone company warehouse is out of the particular kind of conduit it uses and the person who needs to sign off the cable company work just quit and the sewer line will have to be deflected onto DOT land and will need an additional permit and so on. This is why you find yourself watching utility work on the road asking yourself, “Didn’t they just tear up this road last year?” Yes, “they” probably did, because no two (let alone more) agencies can get along together long enough to do underground work. Well, sometimes they do. But not consistently.
The telephone lines to my house and all of my neighbours are underground right to the dwellings, as are the electricity cables. This gives a much better aspect to the street.
I’d have to agree. Some communities are doing it successfully. I think there will always be some above-ground wiring, but I don’t see any reason that new communities can’t bury it.
In my suburban neighborhood (Louisiana, US) all our utilities are underground. We recently had reason to inquire about replacing electrical service to the house. The cost was substantial- $40/ft to dig the trench and $20/ft for the cable. Understand that this was a small job, one house in an existing subdivision, but the cost is apparently a standard charge-it didn’t depend on the location.
Apparently the rediculously high cost of digging the trench (around here we don’t have frost but do have a high water table so that underground cables might only be 24 inches underground) had more to do with the cost of identifying and avoiding existing utilities than just digging a skinny hole in the ground.