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8B Daily News – Thursday, July 5, 2012 Furniture Depot 235 So. Main St., Red Bluff 527-1657 SAT. 9:00-5:00 • SUN. 11:00-5:00 MON.-FRI. 9:00-6:00 WASHINGTON (AP) — In the aftermath of storms that knocked out power to millions, swelter- ing residents and elected officials are demanding to know why it's taking so long to restring power lines and why they're not more resilient in the first place. The answer, it turns out, is complicated: Above- ground lines are vulnerable to lashing winds and falling trees, but relocating them underground incurs huge costs — as much as $15 million per mile of buried line — and that gets passed onto consumers. With memories of other extended outages fresh in the minds of many of the 1.26 million customers who still lack electricity, some question whether the deliv- ery of power is more precar- RED BLUFF ious than it used to be. The storms that began Friday have been responsible for the deaths of 24 people in seven states and the District of Columbia, including a utility contractor who fell to his death Monday in Garrett County, Md., while remov- ing limbs from a storm- damaged tree. ''It's a system that from an infrastructure point of view is beginning to age, has been aging,'' said Gre- gory Reed, a professor of electric power engineering at the University of Pitts- burgh. ''We expanded and modernized the bulk of the transmission and distribution network.'' The powerful winds that swept from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic late Fri- day, toppling trees onto power lines and knocking haven't Tehama County CONTRACTORS GUIDE DAILYNEWS 2012 TEHAMACOUNTY Magazine-size print and online Distribution through Spring, 2013 Licensed contractors only. If you're a licensed contractor In Tehama County, your business name, Lic #, phone and specialty will be listed at no charge advertising is available In this directory! To add information and stand out from the crowd, low cost DEADLINE: TUE, JULY 10 Call your Daily News Advertising Representative For further information! (530) 527-2151 Furniture Depot would like to introduce the 10 Stop by and see how affordable owning a Tempur-pedic can be Easy fix eludes power outage problems in US tric bills by 125 percent. An onslaught of recent extreme weather around the country, including heat waves, wildfires and flood- ing, has increased strain on infrastructure already strug- gling to meet growing con- sumer demand. And some scientists predict the severe weather will only increase, though it will take time to study this year's weather before any conclusions can be drawn. MCT photo Lightning rolls through the sky over a restaurant in Newport News,Va., Sat- urday as severe thunderstorms moved through the area. out transmission towers and electrical substations, have renewed debate about whether to bury lines. Dis- trict of Columbia Mayor Vincent Gray was among officials calling for the change this week and was seeking to meet with the chief executive of Pepco, the city's dominant utility, to discuss what he called a slow and frustrating response. ''They obviously need to invest more in preparing for getting the power back on,'' said Maryland state Sen. James Rosapepe, who is among those advocating for moving lines underground. ''Every time this happens, they say they're shocked — shocked that it rained or snowed or it was hot — which isn't an acceptable excuse given that we all Though the newest com- munities do bury their power lines, many older ones have found that it's too expensive to replace exist- ing networks. To bury power lines, util- ities need to take over city streets so they can cut trenches into the asphalt, lay down plastic conduits and then the power lines. Man- holes must be created to connect the lines together. The overall cost is between $5 million and $15 million per mile, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, Inc., a nonprofit research and development group funded by electric utilities. Those costs get passed on to residents in the form of higher electric bills, making the idea unpalatable know about climate change.'' for many communities. Power lines are already underground in parts of Washington, but initial esti- mates are that it would cost as much as $5.8 billion to bury them throughout the entire city and would cost customers an additional $107 per month, said Michael Maxwell, Pepco's vice president of asset man- agement. ered burying its lines in 2003, after a winter storm knocked out power to 2 mil- lion utility customers. The North Carolina Public Staff Utilities Commission even- tually concluded it was ''prohibitively expensive'' and time-consuming. The project would have cost $41 billion and taken 25 years to complete — and it would have raised residential elec- North Carolina consid- Pepco has contingency plans for dealing with severe weather like torna- does and hurricanes and runs periodic drills in which staff go through the process of responding to mass out- ages. In this case, though, the hurricane-force winds lashed the region with no advance notice, creating a type of quick-hit storm that caught the utility flat-footed and for which it had not practiced, Maxwell said. ''That's going to be a very big lesson for us,'' he said. ''We need to under- stand how we recover from this.'' A stress index created by the North American Elec- tric Reliability Corp., which monitors the country's power supply to annually assess its performance, shows that day-to-day per- formance seems to have improved, but there was an increase in high-stress days. The company counted six high-stress days in 2011, slightly more than the three preceding years. Weather was a contributing factor in nine of the 10 failures severe enough to generate a federally required report in 2011. acknowledge that the math is little comfort when a cus- tomer's air conditioner fails during a triple-digit heat wave and the food spoils. ''The industry is getting better and better,'' said Aaron Strickland, who oversees distribution and emergency operations for Georgia Power, a sub- sidiary of the Atlanta- based Southern Co. ''In my opinion, I think the expectations of customers are higher and higher because we depend so much on electricity. ... We expect to push that button and it works.'' But utility insiders