re: I see the same thing after every hurricane that hits BR

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Why don’t we start to transition to all underground wires?

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He's figured it out!

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It has to be cheaper than replacing all the lines every few years in a city

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but it's not
and the lines have to go overhead at some point

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Entergy should have started undergrounding

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I will say that we almost never lose power in our neighborhood outside of something major like this. I can't recall an outage longer than 30 minutes in 6-7 years until this.

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I see the same thing after every hurricane that hits BR

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Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but someone has to do it.

Baton Rouge is NOT going to get better. Unless you think Detroit, Chicago and New Orleans is "better".

Just cut down all the trees. What good are they doing anybody anyway?

My neighborhood has underground lines, but this is Louisiana and Entergy- we go out more than above ground areas around us... go figure.

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Our neighborhood has buried lines but we still lost power. They come above ground at some point

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ours too. But the power went out at the spot down the road where a tree fell 10 feet on a janky arse line about 40 in the air. Bury them until they are out of way of trees and shite. You obviously don't have to bury them across the fricking marshes and deserts in this country. It's not rocket science.

How about just a consistent program to remove and/or prune trees and vegetation on those overhead lines that they’ll never bury?

I realize that you can’t take out every tree that could fall over and hit a line. But you can clean up the shitty water oaks and crap like that that drop limbs and take out power. If those hazards were mitigated in advance, there would be much less to do when the big one hits. Plus, we wouldn’t be subject to power failures in every rainstorm.

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Entergy simply doesn't do it b/c they Don't HAVE to. They aren't profit driven they aren't punished for this catastrophic failure in infrastructure. They aren't even summoned to Senate Hearings.
Entergy should have started undergrounding EVERYTHING they repaired and every NEW line since 19 fricking 99.

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All of their costs are passed on to the consumers though.

Let’s say they did what you just said. A branch falls on a line and knocks out power to three blocks. Instead of spending $3k to send a bucket truck out and fix it, they spend $250k to directionally drill and run underground conduits for those blocks. They ALSO spend the $3k to fix the above ground line in the interim, because people don’t want to wait 6 months for power to come back.

Now assume they do this for every single outage caused by a tree branch. Next thing you know, Entergy has a 25 year backlog of projects and your storm offset is $250/month with no end in sight. How do you think the public would react to that? Entergy can’t just unilaterally make that decision. It has to be driven by the PSC.

Everybody is cool with the cost until they realize they are the ones that have to actually pay for it.

I agree that new installations should be run underground where possible. But that cost should (and does, I think) fall on the developers.