Our neighborhood is about the same age. Power lines buried to the house, but the lines getting to the neighborhood are on poles.
Why don’t you go to work for the State of Texas and show them what to do?
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Cheap shot.
I vote for people to run the state who I think can do a better job than the incumbents…and me.
So you are free to second-guess incessantly and to point out what they should have done?
No. Climate is always climate. But “news” is also always “news”.
Am I not allowed to have an opinion?
Of course, everyone does in your adopted country. You are an intelligent, creative guy, and I would never say or think your opinion does not matter. Your opinion seems to be government never does anything right or timely, and that opinion is shared by many others. My opinion is shit happens sometimes, especially at the hands of Mother Nature, and attempting to place the blame on elected officials and their employees, like the Austin media is doing now, is pointless bitching after the fact and is not constructive.
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Exactly
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Here’s an interesting read on ice storms in the Northeast, highlighting a particularly devastating event that produces 2-4" of ice accretion across a broad area up here:
https://www.weather.gov/btv/25th-Anniversary-of-the-Devastating-1998-Ice-Storm-in-the-Northeast
This is fine…
The epicenter of the crisis was Austin, where the city-owned power utility said it didn’t know when it would be able to restore power to more than 150,000 households and businesses, many of which have lacked electricity since Wednesday morning. Austin Energy had previously said it would have power restored by 6 p.m. Friday.
Yeah, I read Friday this morning.
I lived in north east Tenn for 14 years in a small town served by a TVA electric coop. They were diligent at keeping trees near lines cut back. They even cut down whole trees that were diseased and dying that were close to the power lines. People hated how their maples and cedars would look with big gaps in them.
We would get several big snows with often heavy wet snow. Our neighborhood was built in the 70’s and was all above ground lines with mature trees. We very rarely lost power and never for very long.
I now live in subdivision in Alabama that has underground utilities. But we are supplied by one line that runs on a pine tree lined major county road. All it takes is one line to go out on that road and we are without power. We have lost power more in 6 years due to thunderstorms/winds than we did in 14 years of heavy snow and ice. I love seeing the tree trimmers because I know we get to keep power. It isn’t perfect and it doesn’t prevent all outages but they minimize the number and severity.
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You do; your opinion sucks. That’s my opinion.
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Why this year’s treepocalypse is worse than with past ice storms:
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Nailed it.
Noonish at Round Mountain/Sandy, Texas, before things thawed out
Thank god for tractors with cabs. It was miserable out there today.
Marble Falls was nothing…I did not expect the amount of ice I encountered on my way South on 281.
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Holy cow!
Some numbers on the possible cost to bury power lines.
TL:DNR - Here in California, our foremost provider of wildfires, PG&E, is paying $2,500,000/mile to bury their power lines. By way of comparison, Austin Energy has over 12,000 miles of power lines.
California is paying $2,500,000/mile. But Texas could probably do it for half that.
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