Comments by "ke6gwf - Ben Blackburn" (@ke6gwf) on "" video.
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@scottmanley as someone who long lived in typical California terrain where underground would be most useful, and also worked in construction and underground utilities in those areas, the reason they don't do it is because it would be incredibly expensive, and require cutting swaths though the land about the same as putting an oil pipeline in.
Most of the California hills are rock, and digging trenches of any size either requires a very long time with large hydraulic hammers on giant excavators, or blasting. Neither of which the neighbors would appreciate.
In much of it the rock is too hard for breaking, and so would require blasting.
And don't be picturing a 1 foot wide trench a couple of feet deep, if you are installing anything high voltage, you are going to be looking at a 3 to 4 foot wide trench, probably 8 or 10 feet deep, and all the material removed gets trucked away, and then it's backfilled with imported sand and capped with cement.
There is no way they would be given the permits to do this, with the required extensive clearing and road building that it would require, and would take decades just to work through the environmental impact studies and deal with fish protection plans etc.
If this were soft and level ground, it's only several times more expensive, but those aren't the places where the fire danger is high, which is the mountains and canyons and high places where the wind is highest, and where you are on shallow bedrock.
Many of the lines currently at risk are installed using helicopters, and since there would be no way to install a oil pipeline through the same terrain, they would have to be routed miles out of the way, increasing the costs many fold again.
When you look at the places that do underground utilities, you will find that they are mostly on dirt, and don't have much shallow bedrock to deal with, and also that they have much smaller areas, and so they aren't dealing with a 200 mile run through rugged mountains.
There are places where it makes sense, and where they are putting it underground, but the majority of places where underground would be nice, it's not a practical option, and it's not just expensive, it's unbelievably expensive, and incredibly damaging to the environment.
So I am not trying to defend pg&e, just giving my experience as someone who has done a lot of digging in those areas, and I watched a lot of pipelines being installed, and what they had to fight with.
My little town up in the hills above the Napa Valley in many places has the road asphalt directly on the rock surface, and it's common for the water line and the gas line to be in a trench scraped into the bedrock barely below the asphalt, sometimes with the asphalt directly on it. (leading to frequent leaks lol)
In order to put the power lines underground you would have to blast trenches through this everywhere....
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