Why doesn't the President do a "WPA (Works Project Administration)" style project where public funds pay to bury utility wires underground?

Because all of that screams “socialism”.
WPA has “works” in the name, which screams socialism, and CCC is too close to CCCP (soviet union).

I agree with @ragingloli.
Furthermore, I think even ‘underground cables’ screams “Europe,” which, it goes without saying, screams “socialism.”
Ugh. J’en ai ras le bol.
Obama has practically moved to the center right IMHO, because we are dealing with an overall political discourse that has moved to the extreme right. Do you think he would want to draw even more comparisons with FDR, who is the equivalent for many liberals, leftists and progressives of the neo-cons’ beloved Ronald Reagan????

I grew up in a town where all powerlines were underground and it makes for a much prettier community. We rarely lost power, but it does happen. There are still electrical boxes above ground, transformers, and main grids above ground that can get struck by lightening or have troubles.

Pretty much it is left to developers to put lines underground from what I can tell. The city I grew up in was all developed by one group the Kettler Brothers. They created a planned community with no power lines, walking tunnels under roads so kids could walk to school and to community pools, playgrounds, and tennis courts without crossing in the middle of a 4 lane street. Bicycle paths, community shopping area (a small mall) sidewalks, etc. I guess maybe some towns and cities require underground wires inside of subdivisions, but along main roads I don’t see it much.

Where I live now, there is an attitude of my land I do what I want, antigovernment, etc. There is some planning starting to be done with zoning and permitting, stricter rules, as the town grows.

In the past when I have said to people it would be nice if lines were underground a typical answer is, “then it is difficult to repair them.” After growing up in a town that has underground lines, I really doubt that is a big factor. I doguess that it is more expensive to put in underground lines.

Cost will always be a deterrent.

Reminder: Manhattan does have underground powerlines if Storm Sandy is what made you think of this. They still lost power in some areas because of a transformer being hit, and there are some other vulnerable parts of the system.

When you go to newer communities, you don’t see phone poles and wires everywhere like you do in older towns and cities. It’s not unheard of to have underground utilities.

@jca Right, the developer put them in either because they wanted it for the community, or the city required it.

I can’t see our federal government ever tackling putting wires underground in older communities, it would have to be done on a local level I think.

Where will the money come from? Burying a zillion miles of cable would mean environmental impact statements, permits, and all sorts of legal paperwork – before a shovel hit the ground. And then there’s the cost of the workers and machinery to do this.

In the current deficit mania, there is no way that politicians would ever spend the money, no matter how good an idea it is.

@jca A lot of older communities are houses just built along a road and not subdivisions where one developer created a specific idea, ambiance, for that development.

@elbanditoroso makes excellent and the most commonsense points to further the discussion. Where will the money come from?

Don’t governments float bonds in order to achieve large scale projects such as bridges?

@bkcunningham
Cut the defence budget in half.

What half would you cut, @ragingloli? The taxpayers still pay for the projects, @jca, when local governments issue bonds. I’m not sure I know what you mean by the phrase float bonds, to be honest, @jca, in regards to this topic.

Of course it’s a good idea. Not only would it better protect lines it could be done in conjunction with a massive infrastructure upgrade that we could greatly benefit from. It would increase employment, provide carryover training for lots of people, and do so long term. What you’re suggesting is probably a multi-decade project if done nationally and worked at all levels of infrastructure.

The political, legal, and paper work will be most problematic but that’s by choice and interest; there’s nothing there that can’t be overcome. Fund it with bonds, taxes, and mandatory federal, state, and local appropriation – the same way everything is funded. Now would, in fact, be a great time to get started with interest rates as low as they are. After that keeping administration, corruption, gouging to an effective minimum will be the (not so easy) focus.

However, to directly answer your question, he doesn’t do it because congress and the state & local levels won’t have it for too many reasons to list. And I’m not sure the public has the stomach for seeing the bill.

@bkcunningham
Closing down all foreign bases, stopping useless development of new toys, mothballing large parts of currently active airplanes, tanks, ships, etc, any future procurement of equipment will be done only slightly above cost from manufacturers, so they cease making large profits, and there will be permanent federal investigators with full access in those supplier companies to make sure that they do not try ripping off taxpayers, and of course reducing the number of soldiers to a number that does not permit anything more than direct defence and small scale overseas participation in UN activities.

How many soldiers would be unemployed with your plan, @ragingloli?

@bkcunningham
The number would be determined by a commission after evaluating the requirements of pure defence.
But needless to say, a lot of them would. And I would waste not a single tear for them. Let them become mercenaries for some 3rd world despot.

The point of the question is to get people working and help communities, @ragingloli. Your response doesn’t make sense in that regard.

@bkcunningham
drag them to the construction sites then

It’s not an awful idea… But even putting the wires underground comes with it’s own problems. What happens when an earthquake severs one, or frozen water beneath the surface severs one like it does pipes? Even if the chances of a severed wire go down, it would be a major chore to dig one up to fix it.

@tedd Many cold and snowy communties have underground wires. I mentioned above that people always tell me what you wrote. I wonder if there is any information out there showing the actual costs of repair for underground lines taking into account how often they have problems. We almost never lost power in my city growing up in Montomery Village outside of Washington, DC. This tells the size of the community, to give you an idea of how many homes and residents. My parents who still live there did not lose power in this storm, but they did for several hours in some other storm recently, I don’t remember what it was, because lightening hit a main box. It wasn’t a wire problem.

@JLeslie Well honestly the biggest issue with power loss, is that our grid is centralized. We have these massive power plants that power massive regions of a state, and that power has to travel from the generation source to the usage source. We lose power during that transfer, we risk the path being cut (downed power lines), and we risk losing the whole region anyways if for some reason the power plant goes down.

If you want to upgrade our power grid, priority number one should be to make smaller, more localized power plants. Regardless of what runs them (fossil fuels, solar, geothermal, etc). I think where we put the necessary power lines is really a secondary problem. Especially since I’m sure we probably have technology that’s just as financially viable as placing wires underground, that would simply strengthen our existing above ground lines and make them less prone to damage during a storm (such as metal posts rather than wooden ones, or chain-mail-ish reinforced wiring, etc, etc).

@tedd You actually are speaking my language. That was one of the things I didn’t like about the Pickens plan with the windmills and more power infrastructure across the country. I prefer local power plants, greener plants, and also solar panels on the tops of individual houses where it is feasible, even if it is just to heat hot water heaters (solar heated water is very efficient). Big power plants in the end give money to big government and big business from what I can tell, of course they like the idea.

The argument for any WPA type project is always that it takes jobs away from the private sector which, in my mind, does not make sense because the work is not being done at this time anyway. You are actually adding more work and, although I don’t personally care for the idea because it does line the pockets of business owners, you could always subcontract the work out to companies in the area that the lines are being done.
Realistically though if they did it they would hire large multinationals, like they did in Iraq, and let them hire locals thus adding yet another layer of administrative costs.

It’s going to have to be done, but knowing the con-man leadership of our political discourse these days, it won’t get touched till a solar flare or thermonuclear attack burns out the entire power grid of the nation and leaves us in total darkness without heat or communications for months on end. Then we’ll realize that we have to build an underground, shielded smart grid suitable for the 21st century and beyond, and all the idiots clamoring for going back to the Guilded Age of a few robber baron billionaires and a vast nation of wage slaves are just that—idiots.

@ETpro Why does it have to be done? The lines can stay above ground.

Also, where will the money come from?

Money aside, it protects the lines from external damage. Buried lines don’t get knocked down from trees.

@bkcunningham They would either have to cut spending somewhere else, raise taxes, or deficit spend.

But think about this, every time a massive power outage such as this current one takes place, billions of dollars are lost by businesses who can’t operate or suffer losses from failed power. And that’s not getting into repairing the out-dated infrastructure. A one time up front fee of billions of dollars to upgrade the infrastructure could save us billions multiple times in the future.

@tedd, I understand exactly what you are saying. Tell me this though. Why do we have to pay for a private companies to improve their infrastructure?

Uh, are you serious?

It’s not “their” infrastructure, it’s “ours”; everyone pays so everyone can benefit. If we can’t handle the thought of doing it through direct spending, do it through legislation. Either way, there’s no sense in waiting for it to become a crisis before addressing it. Burying lines is just one part of many grid issues that need to, and can, be worked on now to make tangible improvements in capacity, reliability, efficiency, and recovery.

Pepco here in DC supposedly said, it’s going to cost at least 3 million dollars to bury a single block(?) of cable. Whoa.

It is always going to be so much more expensive to retrofit. You gotta fix roads, walks, other utilities, re-route traffic, etc.

@bkcunningham The entirety of our power infrastructure was paid for by government grants and government money. Without said money, there was (and still isn’t today) no private company with the resources or will to build and maintain such a massive system. Not to mention the multitude of private industries that operate individual power plants or lengths of the grid wiring. It would be a complete mess.

That cost is somewhat offset by the private companies, who pay a portion of the costs in return for the right to sell their power along those lines. But if it became 100% the responsibility of the businesses, costs would go up for consumers and in many areas it would no longer be deemed feasible to even have electricity.

It’s not as simple as some would like it to be.

In the first place, it is very expensive to install underground power lines, and the reliability is not what you might expect. That is, underground power lines have a reduced lifespan compared to overhead in-the-air systems.

American utility companies have discovered, after many years of experience with both types of utility wiring (including high-power, medium-power distribution and “neighborhood” power systems), that in-the-air wiring actually has a projected lifespan measured at around 50 years or greater. (Dry areas of the country typically aren’t so hard on the wiring. Overhead wiring in those areas lasts even longer.)

On the other hand, buried power lines, in addition to being so much more expensive to install, only last for about 20 years or so. (I expect that condensation in the wiring ducts is a big part of the problem, but earth movement is probably another factor.) Because of this, even though “while installed and operational” the systems are generally about twice as reliable as over-the-ground wiring, when outages occur they typically last about twice as long per customer.

So there it is: The “per customer” experience measured in outage-minutes per year is about the same for both systems, but the underground wiring is far more expensive and has a shorter lifespan.

Source: My Google search for ‘reliability of underground wiring’, which you might be able to mine more deeply than I did.

@bkcunningham You are completely right. Let the whole country crumble.

Anyone remember when Republicans used to LIKE stimulus spending? It wasn’t that long ago, folks.

@tedd, are you saying that our power companies are government owned? You lost me.

@bkcunningham Power companies build/maintain/repair power lines (and in many cases power plants themselves, like Nuclear plants) with government grants/money. They are privately run, and the companies themselves still put forward large sums of money, but the cost is highly offset by the government. The government also mandates that those companies maintain power to low population areas where it would not be otherwise profitable to do so.

So, what you are saying is that people pay for it twice and a company still makes a profit.

Anyway, I’d love to see a cost estimate of your proposal, @tedd. I can’t even imagine the magnitude of such an undertaking.

It’s very easily do-able and a great idea. If only some entrepreneur could see a way to become rich out of it, the way the railroad builders and the oil barons have, it would be started tomorrow, and all the objections listed above would be overcome. People can do anything when there is profit involved.

@YARNLADY – who pays the money that makes the companies the profit?

@elbanditoroso I believe most of it comes from those who benefit from the project, the users. Many times, projects like that are, indeed, funded by the taxpayers, but that certainly isn’t a deal breaker – witness the bullet train in California.

A group of entrepreneurs secretly bought up a lot of land in the center of California, and are now profiting from it big time. I witnessed a similar boondogle a few years back when some land was purchased by dummy buyers and then a State college was pushed through, that required the building of a new cloverleaf on the freeway, over land that was just coincidentally owned by the very people who pushed the project through.

The college was staffed with administrators who were paid huge salaries, before one shovel full of dirt had ever been moved. The completed college is now sitting empty, and some staff members are still getting paid.

I recently read that a new prison was built the same way, and it is also sitting empty, yet has a paid administrative staff.

@YARNLADY – the bullet train is paid for by state or municipal bonds. Where do you think that state is getting tax money from to pay off the bonds?

Lower Manhattan has buried utilities. Hasn’t helped much the last two days.

@zenvelo Aha, I wondered about that.

@elbanditoroso As I said funded by the taxpayers, but that certainly isn’t a deal breaker – witness the bullet train in California.

@YARNLADY, the Bullet Train project is going to cost taxpayers over $68 billion for about 800 miles of railroad line.

Aside from the economic and technical difficulties and considerations I mentioned earlier, we do have this quaint device in the USA called “The Constitution”, under which the President does not have the authority to, as Nike® ads would suggest “Just Do It.”

Not that those quaint limitations have stopped many presidents in my lifetime from doing just about whatever the hell they want to do.

As I said above, Manhattan has underground wires, but there are still transformers and some other electrical components above ground. My point is, the people who say the wire can have problems below ground, or it is harder to fix an outage if the problem is below ground, as far as I know the problem is rarely in the wires below ground. There are still vulnerable points above ground, but they are above ground, so you don’t have to worry about digging stuff up all the time.

I work for AT&T, and have undergrounded the lines in several areas.
It does make the neighborhoods look nicer, and it cuts down on the copper thefts we deal with.
The company does get taxed differently on underground vs. aerial lines. Aerial lines are cheaper.
Usually, the individual homeowners have to pay for the conduits going from the sidewalk feed to the side of their houses. This can be pretty expensive, especially on homes with long driveways.

@bkcunningham Yes, that is my point. The cost to the taxpayer does not stop a project, no matter how foolish or wasteful it is. If the right people get behind it, it will happen.

@CWOTUS Thanks for the research, and I do not doubt or discount the truth of what Wikepedia says about underground versus aerial line costs and lifetimes. But that is yesterday’s technology. If we had been locked into what was possible in stone age times, we’d all be living in caves even today.

There was a time when oil oozed from the ground in some places but was difficult to use. If John D. Rockefeller had not figured out how to efficiently bring it to the surface and fraction off kerosene from it, we would all still go to bed at sunset.

There was a time when it was impossible to build a bridge across the mighty Mississippi without blocking river traffic because iron simply could not withstand the loads involved. If Andrew Carnegie hadn’t been steadfastly convinced that steel could be manufactured cost effectively and could build a railroad bridge over the huge river, we’d never have linked coast to coast. We’d never have built mighty skyscrapers that mark all our major cities today.

There was a time when kerosene lanterns were all we had to light our nation. If J. P. Morgan hadn’t believed in Edison’s electric light and Tesla’s alternating current, we’d still have no electric grid, and we wouldn’t even understand what a discussion of its future form meant. We’d have no kerosene powered Internet to even discuss it on.

Tomorrow was never secured by those stuck in what was possible yesterday. Tomorrow has always belonged to those who ask why not, who believe it is possible, and who have the resolve to find out how to do it. There will be an underground, hardened, smart grid. There will be because it needs to be, and just like the bridge across the Mississippi, if it needs to be badly enough, somebody will figure out how it CAN be.

@bkcunningham wow wow wow… I never said it was my plan. I even pointed out that it in itself comes with it’s own drawbacks. But it would likely decrease instances like what you’re seeing on the East Coast right now.

And yes, people pay a lot of money for their utilities, be it through the government money or tax breaks the power companies get, or having to still pay for the power the power companies supply. Without the government behind it though, as I pointed out, there is no private company that would have been capable of building the system we have now, or even one remotely as widespread or efficient.

Absolutely, @ETpro. Web pages should open at the speed of light, too, since we’re discussing the movement of electrons, after all. Make it so; any thing slower is yesterday’s technology.

I get feelings of inadequacy and even some embarrassment when I attempt to weigh in with pronouncements of “how it should be” on technology that I don’t know anything about. I guess that puts me in another minority group on Fluther.

@CWOTUS If you want to form a club, I’ll be a charter member. I can see both instant Internet and tomorrow’s hardened, buried smart grid as possibilities. I know that since they are needed and just technical problems to solve, they will be. But if I had the technical know-how to do either of them, I would be as wealthy as those captains of capitalism of the Gilded Age I mentioned in my post.