From the Editor’s Desk: Bury Those Power Lines

by Marlene Berlin

Davenport Street, just west of Connecticut Avenue (top), and Linnean Street. (photos by Erica Baller)

Trees uprooted, power outages, over 100-degree heat — I missed it all. My husband and I were in Paris enjoying 75-degree highs with some rain in between the sunshine. We kept in touch with our daughter who was housesitting for us. She made sure we knew what a mess it was to clean out the refrigerator. She lectured me not to store the ice cream on its side in the freezer. She survived by sleeping in our much cooler basement and recharging her phone and laptop in the car.

I kept abreast of news online to see when the heat wave would break and power would be restored. I was feeling rather guilty about having my daughter deal with yet another emergency — the last one being 40 inches of snow when we were in Florida a couple of years ago.

I griped to my husband that it was just crazy that we have not yet buried our lines. Soon I got an email from him with a link to an article making the same point. The power company’s standard retort again was that it’s just too costly. I fumed at the lack of rebuttal considering the costs to business and government. Beyond that, I was worried about some of my senior neighbors, who would have a hard time in the heat.

Pepco outage maps following June 29 storm. Green triangle=One home. Blue triangle=Multiple homes. Yellow triangles and areas = Hundreds without power.

We know we will continue to have storms, trees will fall on power lines, power outages will result, business and government will suffer, and individuals can die. Have we not reached and probably gone beyond the point where the cost is just too great?

One of my walking buddies, Annette Aburdene, who is German and lives on Linnean, told me a couple of months ago on one of our walks, “We don’t have this mess with wires in Germany. We buried our lines long ago.” If the Germans and other European cities can do this, we can do it, too. Click this sentence for more information on how Europe has gone underground.

There appears to be momentum on the Council to push Pepco on this issue. But Councilmembers are soon going on their break. Let’s make sure that come September, they don’t forget.

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