How Many Hurricane Idas Can Electricity Users Afford?
Climate change is altering the cost-benefit analysis for vital infrastructure such as power grids.
Fixing power grids is becoming more costly and contentious.
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
One of the less obvious outcomes of the Great Blizzard of 1888 was that, by the following year, crowds of New Yorkers were following workers around yelling “timber!” as they chopped down wooden utility poles. The ferocious winter storm pushed the city to get serious about burying the growing network of power and telegraph lines strung over its streets. Climate change wasn’t part of the conversation back then. But a dose of extreme weather helped tip the balance in a continuing tussle about the hazards of overhead lines and the costs of putting them underground.
New Orleans lost power this weekend as Hurricane Ida put all of the transmission lines that feed the city out of action. One giant tower that withstood Hurricane Katrina in 2005 crashed into the Mississippi. Entergy Corp., which supplies power in much of Louisiana, said the hardest hit areas may experience outages for weeks. As is usually the case after a catastrophic storm, we can expect calls to bury the region’s power lines along with the swift response that doing so just costs too much.