That's a known risk, living as we do out in the Alaska woods. We knew that moving in, and we expect it, and we're happy to deal with it (although we are looking into household battery backups). But this happens 3-4 times a year, and why? Because our power and phone lines are all above ground, mounted on wooden poles, just like in days of old. Windstorms drop trees across lines, drop branches, and cause damage, which has to be repaired.

In more urban and suburban areas, power, phone, and internet cables are increasingly buried, and that's a good thing, for several reasons, not least of which are reliability and security. The blog Neurologica's Dr. Steven Novella has some thoughts.

We may have a unique opportunity to make an infrastructure investment that can demonstrably save money over the long term – by burying power and broadband lines. This is always an option, of course, but since we are in the early phases of rolling out fiber optic service, and also trying to improve our grid infrastructure with reconductoring, now may be the perfect time to also upgrade our infrastructure by burying much of these lines.

This would save money, but there's another aspect to this, and that's grid security. Buried cables are harder to attack, although some parts of the grid that require maintenance would still have to be above ground. Also, a buried cable would be harder to locate in the first place, although we can presume that in most places, they would parallel roadways.

It might also save money.

 Benefits of aggressively co-undergrounding electric and broadband lines outweigh costs. First, they found that co-undergrounding (simply burying broadband and power lines at the same time) saves about 40% over doing each individually. This seems pretty obvious, but it’s good to put a number on it. But more importantly they found that the whole project can save money over the long term. They modeled one town in Mass and found:

“Over 40 years, the cost of an aggressive co-undergrounding strategy in Shrewsbury would be $45.4 million, but the benefit from avoiding outages is $55.1 million.”

The reduced cost comes mostly from avoiding power outages. This means that areas most prone to power outages would benefit the most.

Here's the thing: There may be a little urban/suburban bias here. Rural areas will, for the foreseeable future, be reliant on poles.

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While Dr. Novella admits that burying isn't practical everywhere, he makes a fair point about urban and suburban areas. When we lived in Colorado, those lines were all buried, but we lived in an area that had been developed in the late '70s. Older areas, such as around the second home we maintained for nearly two years in heavily built-up New Jersey, still have power lines above ground, and that is, yes, not only a reliability but also a security issue. Exposed power lines and, especially, transformers are horribly exposed should anyone decide to attack them. A single rifle bullet through a transformer could cause all kinds of problems, and it's rather surprising that more of these lines in some older neighborhoods haven't been buried. 

It seems a better use of the people's time and money than running shrimp on treadmills or the various other things that the government gets up to - and infrastructure, yes, is a distributed interest that government does have some place in influencing. And burying these lines with modern technology, like horizontal boring (thank you, petroleum industry) makes it even easier and more efficient. 

Our grid, as it is, is vulnerable in too many ways. We are too vulnerable, and our grid is too available in too many places for whatever evil someone may wish to wreak. That's a bigger problem than reliability - although burying the lines addresses both.

But, as with everything, there are and will always be limits. Rural areas will probably continue to rely on lines mounted on poles.  In suburban and urban areas, there are already rights-of-way for gas lines, sewage lines, and so forth, so burying power lines wouldn't necessarily rely on a new easement, but we have no such services in many rural areas, where people are dependent instead on fuel oil/LP gas deliveries and septic systems.

We certainly will be relying on poles here in the Susitna Valley for the foreseeable future. Not only do we contend with a very low people-per-square-mile population out there, but we also have snow measured in feet and a deep frost line. Lines on poles are always accessible; buried lines would be out of reach for much of the year. But burying is a good answer in much of the country: It's good for reliable energy, it's good for keeping maintenance costs due to weather damage down, and it's good for keeping much of our grid just a tad more secure.