re: Interesting graphic on number of power poles damaged by Ida compared with other hurricanes

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Not feasible at all. Not for distribution lines. Wires run on the poles are not insulated. That is by design. If cables are put in the ground they would have to increase the size of the cables and drop the voltage that they are carrying on them. Which then would increase the power needed to generate enough power. And that’s not including the shitload of new transformers that would need to be installed. One other thing. Finding a fault in a buried cable is challenging to pinpoint while you can see where the problem is with above ground lines. Like I said. It is really not feasible to even contemplate doing this. Outage times would triple if not more when the power goes out. I have spent plenty of hours inside manholes making splices on new cables that had to be replaced

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Nah man, you can totally just stick some extension cords 6 inches in the ground with a cable plow. Hell, you can get bare copper wire and the mud will insulate it. It’s out of sheer greed that they don’t do this since once every 5-15 years a big enough storm comes through to knock 10’s of thousands of poles down.