5 Local Mayors And 2 Supes Ask SC Edison To Bury Power Lines
Written by 991KBU on February 27, 2019
Southern California Edison is being urged to bury its power lines in the Santa Monica Mountains area.
Now … mayors from Malibu … four other cities and county supervisors from L A and Ventura County are urging that to happen.
A letter signed by five area mayors and two county supervisors calls for utility companies to start burying power lines to ensure they don’t start a fire.
Ventura County Supervisor Linda Parks reportedly composed the letter … with input from the mayors of Thousand Oaks, Calabasas, Agoura Hills, Hidden Hills and Malibu.
L.A. County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl.
Parks tells the Thousand Oaks Acorn newspaper that she hopes the federal government can pass legislation to require underground power lines.
She says that the federal government “is looking at putting in hundreds of millions of dollars in forest management.
This is something else that will actually stop the fires from starting,” Parks said. “It’s become the reason why we have ignitions of wildfires out in our urban areas. It’s all coming from the power lines.”
The cost of burying a power line is three million dollars a mile … and undergroundign all the power lines in Malibu city limits alone would cost between 600 million dollars and 1 point 8 billion dollars.
That’s between 100 thousand and 300 thousand dollars per property … and that’s just within Malibu alone.
The California Public Utilities Commission has in the past firmly rejected burying powerlines to prevent fires.
The CPUC says it’s fundamentally unfair to charge ratepayers in urban areas to bury power lines in the mountainous suburbs.
But the past disastrous fires in Malibu … Ventura and Santa Barbara … not to mention Napa Santa Rosa and paradise … maybe changing attitudes.
Southern California Edison is now switching many of its overhead power lines to a new technology … plastic-coated power lines that are insulated … and more impervious to sparking fires.
SCE admitted its hanging power lines were responsible for one of the two ignition points of the Thomas fire in 2017.
Calabasas Mayor David Shapiro told the Acorn that burying power lines “is a drastic thought, but the fires are getting worse and worse.”
“Whether people want to agree or not, (environmental) change is an absolute factor.”
Agoura Hills Mayor Linda Northrup said utility companies should view the burying of power lines from a cost-benefit standpoint.
