Above-ground power lines grow in risk as climate changes - The Hour

Above-ground power lines grow in risk as climate changes - The Hour: WASHINGTON (AP) - Trees toppling onto above-ground power lines spark wildfires, more than 1,000 of them in the last decade in California alone. The wires snap in blizzards and hurricanes, causing dayslong outages. Everywhere, power poles topple in all kinds of disasters, blocking escape routes.
Around the U.S., dealing with the vulnerability of overhead power lines - one of many problems that experts say will only get worse as the climate deteriorates - by burying them or strengthening them is spotty and disorganized on a national level, and painfully slow, at best.
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 Depar