The residential neighborhoods have them in the back alleys rather than on the street, but you’ll see them crossing from time to time, like so Google Maps. Many of the street lights also have overhead wires but they’re much smaller and more unobtrusive.
Burying local distribution wiring should be much more common, but one reason it’s not is because the USA electrified very early and it wasn’t destroyed by world wars, so the original “throw it up real quick and we’ll deal with cleaning it up later” poles and wires from the 1900s through 1930s were never “dealt with.” Another reason is that our streets and roads are so ugly and hostile to begin with, just look at any suburban commercial strip from the 1950s on, that nobody cares. Also hurr durr too expensive. It’s not as if the sewer, water, and gas lines aren’t also underground, but that in itself can also be somewhat of an impediment to simply finding the available space and safety separation.
An interesting case to look at is Denmark. Take a Google Street View tour of the country and you’ll have to look VERY hard to find any overhead electric at all. One exception is in highly urbanized areas where they string the street lights on wires between building facades, and the feeder wires run down the middle of the street over the lights. Google Maps That’s just a means of reducing poles and clutter on the ground, and it’s exclusively for the lighting. Otherwise, you have to go to a very few suburbs of Copenhagen to find any actual overhead electric, and it’s just the local secondary distribution lines. Even the service drops to the houses are underground, and it’s super tidy. Google Maps That’s the only example I could find (I know there’s others that are even more svelte than this but I haven’t saved them and couldn’t find them). It shows that you can do overhead and it doesn’t have to be a total mess. Granted their 240 volt distribution means they need way fewer transformers which helps a lot. They seem to know what they’re doing.
Once you get into underground transmission it gets much harder. As mentioned by others, keeping the cables cool becomes quite a challenge as you start getting into the tens and hundreds of kilovolts. That’s when you need oil-filled conduits and other such systems that are extremely difficult to maintain if anything goes wrong. Even in general, the problem with undergrounding in a hurricane-prone location is going to be a high water table and intrusion of salt water. Electricity and water don’t mix very well.
Parts of specific cities have been raised for specific reasons, sure. But as a generality, most underground systems in most American cities have been buried in the dirt down to bedrock, or cut through bedrock when absolutely necessary. Go outside of those specific parts and this is still true for Seattle and Chicago. It’s much easier to dig a trench than lift entire city blocks and extreme incentive is needed to decide otherwise.
Center cities faced extreme incentive by the start of the 20th century.
Satirists made fun of the danger merely of walking around. Those are rubber suits to provide people - and horses - from dropped electric lines.
Starting fresh in the unbuilt suburbs is the most cost effective way to bury power lines. Most of the expense that utilities face is replacing them in built-up areas in between the two that have become far more densely populated and over huger areas since 1900.
Heh, I found a post I made here in 2016 talking about this very subject, and the examples I posted there have been undergrounded or significantly reduced in the last decade, so you need the 2009-2015 street views.
Maybe Florida is all sand, but in my area (NE Wisconsin), we have sand, gravel, and in some places, bedrock right at the surface. The utility companies try to go underground but are often unable due to the cost of cutting (or blasting) into rock.
Not long ago, the local utility did a survey to see if they could install gas lines for this residential neighborhood, as some other utilities were partially underground already. They came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be cost effective, so abandoned gasline plans. Too bad, as a tree falls on the power lines every time we have a storm, and we are without services for hours to days. Underground would avoid this.
In a neighborhood not far from mine, there is a different problem. The water table is so close to the surface that anything underground would have to be seriously watertight. And it would make it hard to do maintenance if everything is below water. Think of the construction costs if you had to both blast thru bedrock and waterproof the lines as well.
I suspect Florida might have high water table problems too.
Yeah - my subdivision was built about 40 years ago and has underground utilities. Tge box is the size of a minifridge. I think the county requires new developments to put the power lines underground.
They looked into putting in underground cables in my area, but was too expensive. You have to dig the trenches and make them big enough that people can go in to fix any problems.
Around here (CA Bay Area), I’d say that a significant majority of power lines are buried. High-tension lines are not. Older neighborhoods often have standard overhead lines; somewhat newer neighborhoods seem to be partially buried (the medium-voltage lines are overhead, but the house connections are buried. Very new neighborhoods are totally buried. Also, around high density housing (condos, apartments), power is buried.
As a rule, potable water always goes above sewage. If the sewer line breaks, it will percolate downwards, and not contaminate the water. In the event water lines cross sewer lines, and the sewer must be above the potable water, protective casing is placed around the water line.
For your deep water line, I would suspect there would be quite a horizontal gap between the water and the sewer lines.
A friend of mine did a careful, well-funded research project into this very question and concluded that generally, reliability wasn’t really improved by underground utilities. All you accomplish is substituting lots of short duration storm recovery events with fewer but much longer service disruptions. On balance, overall reliability was very similar and the cost of underground utilities was much higher.
Well, the illustration in question puts the sewage line between 30 and 200 feet and the deep water line between 200 and 800 feet, so I’d say that qualification is fulfilled nicely.
That would be a vertical gap, not a horizontal gap as VOW mentioned. Regardless, clearly the illustration wasn’t meant to show every detail of buried utilities or even be to scale.
I live somewhere where there is practically no above ground electrical stuff (only 380kV transmission lines are above ground) I can confirm that being hit by diggers is a regular occurrence in the life of underground electrical cables. — I can remember 1 instance in the last 30 years.
I cannot imagine that above ground stuff is cost effective in hurricane areas.
My assumption is that almost every street in NYC has a water line on it. A second assumption would be that the reservoir system is also buried under streets, because they wouldn’t tunnel under buildings. Therefore, it would be virtually impossible to have horizontal separation.
I remember reading something once upon a time, that in the early 20th century, the mayor of New York City demanded that the mess of overhead wires (see cartoons a few posts above) be buried instead. When the utilities dragged their feet, he threatened (or I believe actually did) send city workers to start chopping down the poles.
