Utilities say there’s no one best way to safeguard
the millions of miles of U.S. power lines and that
doing so would cost many billions of dollars —
$3 million for a single mile of power lines by some
estimates. Critics counter by pointing to the at
least equally great economic costs of outages and
utility-sparked wildfires. Estimated property losses
for a single such wildfire, a California blaze that
killed 85 last year, reached $16.5 billion.
Overall, electrical outages caused by bad
weather cost the U.S. economy up to $33 billion
in an average year — and more, in an especially
bad weather year, the Energy Department
estimated in 2013. The researchers estimated
there were 679 widespread outages from harsh
weather between 2003 and 2012.
After electrical wires sparked many of
California’s major wildfires in 2017 and 2018,
and threatened more this autumn, many there
turned their fear and anger on PG&E, the state’s
largest investor-owned utility.
Vicki McCaslin, a 60-year-old repeat evacuee in
the San Francisco Bay area, described spotting a
PG&E worker in her neighborhood during a lull
in last month’s wind and fires.
McCaslin burst into tears as she begged the
utility worker to cut off power to her area before
the winds and wildfires resumed, she recounted.
“It scares me to death to think of those kinds of
winds with our power on.”
Nationally, experts say, problems with 19th
century-style set-ups of wires dangling from
wooden poles will only grow as climate
change increases the severity and frequency of
hurricanes, wildfires, big snowstorms and other
disasters like tornados.