Over 1200 subs, including the fire department and the cops on our island have been without service since Thursday morning.

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EDIT: I got it to work, but it looks the same as your's did. Bill

I sure hope they get that "cord" repaired soon. We wouldn't want the town requiring a second service provider. As if a would-be thief wouldn't be cutting their cables too! Some reporting really leaves me shaking my head.

The 'The Shelter Island Supervisor' was the one quoted and he sounds like your typical know nothing elected official.

Does it show that I don't like politicians? It might be my aversion to getting lied to.

I don't know who I hate the most, dumb ass reporters who call a cable a cord or dumb ass politicians who have no idea what they are talking about. -Hal

A nice cold beer or six to the splicers might speed the repair process. :D

Hal, after all of the severe storms that we had in the DC area over this past summer, the outpouring of authority from locals would make your head spin. You see, most of the severe power outages have been in the older areas of the DC metropolitan area, most of them being in Maryland. These areas utilize nearly 100% aerial distribution of utilities that are inter-twined with century-old trees. When the storms come, the trees fall and they take out the utilities with them. The power company (primarily PEPCO) got their asses handed to them a few years ago because of the severity and length of the outages. Their solution was to start a heavy-handed approach to trimming trees in the vicinities of utility easements. Then the tree huggers and property owners started complaining that they didn't want their trees touched, vehicles on their property, views altered, etc. Next came the demand that PEPCO place power lines underground. Hal, you and I both know that putting 19.9KV+ transmission underground isn't going to happen. While it technically can be done, the cost would be astronomical. Forget about the simple cost of trenching, easements, existing utilities, SUBWAY lines and such, they would also have to deal with the NIMBY people who would protest to block such construction on their property. What these fools don't understand is that utility distribution takes a lot more than that simple drop from the pole to their house. They seem to think that the utilities just come up out of the ground at that pole! If the drop is buried, they won't have any more storm-related outages. They never seem to have any interest in discussing exactly who will pay for these costs. These people consider the local utility to be a government entity, when that is not the case at all. They are usually private corporations and any adverse expenses will simply be passed on to the customers. People need to stop boo-hooing when they lose their utilities and choose their poison: Experience occasional outages or pay for what MIGHT be a solution to avoid them. What is most concerning is that the local and mindless politicians follow this same mindset. They seem to think that by forcing PEPCO to put not just local distribution, but also transmission facilities underground, that storms will never affect power distribution again. Fools.............

A LIPA (Long Island Power Authority ... the thieves who took over from the thieves who ran LILCO) spokesman was quoted recently as saying that overhead distribution wires are better than buried wires because "they are easier to fix when they break."

You can't make this stuff up.

But I agree with that logic. A downed power line is much easier to locate and repair than an underground fault. You were joking, right?

It's the same here. Costs to bury utilities were quoted at $1 million/mile with each property owner responsible for the cost of a new UG service. That pretty much shut them up.

And of course aerial is easier to fix though it is subject to more extensive damage. UG does fail and it is more difficult and time consuming to fix. From our perspective look what happens with UG phone cables.

-Hal

Ed, what I was commenting on was the assertion by LIPA that buried service wires get damaged just as often as overhead wires, so in the long run it's easier to get people back in service after a storm.

I have never seen a tree limb damage any underground wires.

Why don't they cut down the tree's and make the telephone poles look like pine tree's like they do with the cell tower's around here ???

I live in a small rural town of about 1500 folks in Kansas. We have lot's of wind storms and the occaisional ice storm. I'm 66 and lived here all my life. The soil is sandy here and digging is easy. For that reason the phone lines are 95% (a guess) UG or buried. Power is still mostly aerial, but it is beefed up and I only remember twice being without power for more than a day. Once when a 132 MPH microburst hit us 20 year ago and blacked us out for 7 days and once when there was an ice storm which put us out for about 24 hours. I'm sure it costs much more to put up lines here than in the East and I'm sure I wouldn't want to pay that if I lived there. Trees here are probably better able to handle the problems as well, because hey are pruned by high winds frequently. By the way that microburst put 29 miles of H-fixture power line flat on the ground.

You have that wayyyyy backwards my friend.

-Hal

I'll back what Hal says. It not cheap to run lines over a mountain made of granite or around lake regions. Many areas in Maine you can't go under ground and to set a pole requires drilling rock and don't forget about Frost.

You're probably right except in the Eastern half of the state, where we have hills, woods, limestone and still get plenty of wind and ice. Fatter poles all over here and more guy wires, but in the western half of the state, pretty much everything low voltage gets buried. I would think on average we have colder winters and hotter summers but less snow and much more ice and wind.