HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — It is day 10 for thousands of CenterPoint Energy customers across the Greater Houston area who are still without power. Some of them live in neighborhoods with buried power lines, leaving them wondering how effective underground electrical systems are in preventing widespread outages.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Kerry West was without power in Humble, while houses across the street had their lights back on. He and his neighbors told ABC13 that their lines have been buried for decades, and they’ve never had an outage last this long.
He said what’s most frustrating is CenterPoint’s electric outage tracker shows that their house was back online, even though it was not. It was eventually restored hours after he spoke to ABC13.
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“I was told years ago that burying the lines stops the movement and breakage. But I haven’t seen any goodness that comes out of it yet,” West said. “The power outage made it very hard on everybody. It was not just my family that I was worried about. It’s the elderly people that we have in the neighborhood.”
Tyson Bower, whose lines are also underground in Sugar Land, got his power back Wednesday afternoon. He told ABC13 that CenterPoint crews told him they prioritize above-ground outages first and could not give him an estimated time for restoration.
It made him question whether having his lines underground was a benefit or a disadvantage.
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“I felt like if we had above-ground lines, everything may have been restored quicker. What I’ve heard is if it was truly an underground issue, it’s hard. It’s more difficult to assess. You have to dig up the line. You have to cut off the power to the entire neighborhood to get to it. That takes time, and it’s way more expensive,” Bower said.
Bower is correct, according to Harish Krishnamoorthy, who teaches electrical and computer engineering at the University of Houston. He explained that some of the downsides to having buried power lines is that it can cost five to 10 times more than an overhead line.
However, underground lines are 10 times less likely to experience interruptions due to protection from physical damage from fallen trees or snapped power poles. But there is still the possibility of outages if it’s connected to overhead lines.
“The cables may be buried underneath when it comes to an end community. But when you go a bit further, that’s where you’ll see a transformer. So many of the distribution systems are still overhead lines. We need to look at where the electricity comes from. If there’s a break in any of those lines, that’s when you see a vast majority of homes in a locality losing power,” Krishnamoorthy said.
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ABC13 asked CenterPoint several questions about buried lines, including whether the costs for future infrastructure plans will be passed onto the customer. However, a spokesperson only answered some of them with the following statement that said in part:
“Approximately 60% of our customers are already served via underground, and CenterPoint will continue to identify strategic opportunities to underground lines. However, because many neighborhoods in Houston are over 100 years old, the streets and yards are not designed to support underground distribution lines. We will continue to increase resiliency in the overhead distribution lines that serve these areas, such as replacing older wooden poles with newer poles made from composite materials and designed to withstand higher wind speeds.
Additionally, one measure in CenterPoint’s Resiliency Plan involves undergrounding certain additional electrical distribution lines in areas, like the lines over freeways or those that serve critical infrastructure, first responders or life-saving care (…) More information about CenterPoint’s efforts to increase reliability and resiliency across our system can be found at CenterPointEnergy.com/EnergyForTheFuture.”
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