Down with Ugly Wires Fewer poles going up now as newer methods and materials reduce cost of undergrounding.

By ANDREW HAMILTON*

OU may not have noticed, but Y telephone poles and overhead power lines are beginning to disappear from America’s residential and down- town areas. Recent technological de- velopments have made it possible to “underground” those ugly wires at reasonable cost-thus minimizing the danger of electrocution and at the same time enhancing the natural beauty of our landscape.

Here is how it is happening: The new towns of Reston, Vir-

ginia, and Columbia, Maryland, have completely buried all their utility lines.

In San Diego, about 60 per cent of the new homes built last year were free of unsightly poles and over- head wires-compared to about 2 per cent in 1960.

Four years ago, the Florida Power and Light Company in Miami put underground the utility wires only for those tract homes priced a t $30,000 or more; today it provides such ser- vice for homes in the $14,000 bracket.

This recent upsurge of under- grounding in residential areas has been made possible by the develop- ment of new equipment, new tech- niques and new materials.

Mechanized ditch-digging machines

* Mr. Hamilton is public affairs officer at UCLA and was formerly a writer for the Los Angeles Times. He is also a well known free-lance writer for various national maga- zines.

can scoop and backfill a trench 24 to 52 inches deep a t the rate of four to five miles a day when there are no obstructions. Some of these ma- chines are equipped with a vibrating blade that works like an electric knife slicing a Thanksgiving turkey. Others loosen frozen or rocky soil with sonic frequencies. Still others “sew” wires right into the ground. At the Bell Laboratories in Chester, New Jersey, cable plows that are no larger than garden tractors have been developed.

Electric cable, insulated d t h poly- ethylene and pre-assembled in plastic duct, can be buried quickly and easily along with telephone cable and gas pipes. Even newer are poly- ethylene-coated wires that can be laid a t random in the soil.

As a result, the cost of under- grounding in new residential areas is coming down all the time and in some residential areas it is now less expen- sive to install than is above-ground wiring.

In 1947, for example, the Southern California Edison Company under- grounded an average-sized lot at a cost of $800 to the homeowner. The cost was $300 in 1962 and $130 in 1966. As prices skidded, the number of installations rose sharply. In 1947, this utility company undergrounded 300 homes in its service area; in 1962, some 1,100 homes; and in 1966, over 18,000.

Not only does undergrounding in-

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crease property values; it also lowers taxes by reducing the cost of mu- nicipal maintenance. The Pine Grove section of Jacksonville Beach, Flor- ida, averaged 25 service calls per year before undergrounding, but has re- quired none since then.

Most undergrounding of new-home utilities is taking place in the west and the south. But the practice is spreading rapidly. Several hundred American cities have passed ordi- nances requiring all builders of new residential developments to put their utility wires out of sight. The Ameri- can Telephone and Telegraph Com- pany and its subsidiaries have buried 15,000 miles of long-distance coaxial cable, and, in 1966, made 635,000 below-surface telephone installations ; by 1970, all new telephone wires in residential areas will be buried.

“We probably won’t be installing overhead lines anywhere in our sys- tem five years from now,” said Wil- liam E. Nelson, senior distribution engineer for the Commonwealth Edison Company in Chicago. “And the rest of the United States won’t be far behind.”

More difficult-and more expen- sive-is the conversion of existing overhead systems of wires and poles to an all-underground system. None- theless, necessity has forced many large cities to hide utility wires be- neath downtown streets and side- walks. Because of the population density in large urban areas, the de- mand for power is huge. The only practical way to move vast amounts of power is with high-voltage wires which are too heavy to hang from standard utility poles. They would have to be installed on steel trans-

mission towers for which there is no room in densely populated areas. This is why you do not see wire-strung poles bristling along Fifth Avenue in New York City, Michigan Avenue in Chicago or Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D. C.

During the past six year< Seattle City Light and Power Company has spent $12 million in a planned pro- gram of undergrounding its utilities. The Illinois Power Company recently launched a ten-year program costing $17,625,000 to streamline and mod- ernize its system. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has budgeted over $15 million this year for undergrounding.

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Sometimes neighborhood initiative helps to get the job done. In Cheviot Hills, a quiet, tree-lined suburb of Los Angeles, residents took advantage of a street-widening project to elimi- nate overhead wires along Motor Avenue, a main thoroughfare. Be- cause the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power planned to ex- cavate the street anyway, the expense of putting wires below ground was only $4,000.

Members of the Cheviot Hills Garden Club easily raised this sum through three $SOO-donations (from the Country Club and two oil com- panies) plus a door-to-door solicita- tion of $10 or more from each home.

The big question about under- grounding-either in installing new lines or converting existing ones-is who pays for it? Here is where a variety of patterns emerges.

In many cases, the cost of new installation or conversion comes from the homeowners’ pocketbook-repre-

514 NATIONAL CIVIC REVIEW [October

senting the difference between under- ground and overhead systems. In sandy Arizona, this difference (in new construction) may be $100 to $200 per lot; in the loam of Pennsylvania, $240; in rocky Massachusetts, $400.

In Pasadena, California, all electric- power consumers within the city limits pay for a program of under- grounding through a special tax on municipal electric bills. In this me- dium-sized city, such a tax raises about $180,000 annually.

In Oakland, California, the cost of conversion is split three ways. The city pays for wires for underground street lights and traffic signals. The Pacific Gas and Electric Company pays for taking down old poles and wires. The property owner pays for extending lines to the main trunk.

* * * In still other communities, utility

companies absorb all or part of the cost. The Northern States Power Company in Minnesota and the Da- kotas picks up the tab for under- grounding all-electric homes. The Portland General Electric Company in Oregon give “points” according to how many electrical appliances are used. Pacific Telephone pays all costs for burying its wires, except in cases where the engineering costs are “unusually)’ high.

In California, the powerful League of California Cities is urging the pub- lic utility commission to make under- grounding a statewide regulation, and the Federal Housing Administra- tion encourages it on a nationwide basis. Unless a housing developer can prove hardship, FHA loans will not be granted if he fails to underground. On the other hand, FHA will boost

its evaluation of homes with below- surface wires by one per cent-allow- ing mortgage lenders to increase their loans by an average of $250.

How does an already-built commu- nity or neighborhood go about bring- ing its poles and wires down? Some- times neighborhood initiative alone can get the job done, Lake Heights, a ten-year-old residential develop- ment of $25,000- to $35,000-homes near Bellevue, Washington, is a good example. The site offered magnificent views of Lake Washington and the snow-covered Olympic Mountain range-when they could be glimpsed through a depressing forest of wire- festooned poles.

On May 6, 1965, at a meeting of the Lake Heights Community Asso- ciation, the question of underground- ing came up. “Our streets are about to be torn up for new sewers,” pointed out lawyer Jack Makus. “Why don’t we get Puget Sound Power and Light and Pacific North- west Bell to bury those wires a t the same time?”

“Too expensive,” said president Bill Salathe, a veteran resident. “We looked into the matter five years ago. It would cost us about $1,300 apiece.”

“Not today,” spoke up Ed Smal- lidge, an assistant supervisor for Puget Power who lived in the Lake Heights area. “New technology should reduce the cost to about $350.”

Salathe was directed to talk to the power and telephone companies. On June 15, he had an engineering esti- mate: $231 per lot for underground- ing the electric wires, $74 per lot for telephone wires. I t was suggested that

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the individual owner could pay for running the service to his lot, or dig the trench himself.

During the fall and winter of 1965, Makus, Salathe and Smallidge at- tended a dozen neighborhood get- togethers in Lake Heights homes to explain the project and obtain sig- natures from property owners on covenants to go underground. By early spring of 1966, some 127 of the 132 homeowners signed up to pay for undergrounding and put the money in escrow. Tom Whitney, a banker, collected payments and ar- ranged for loans where needed.

A formal contract between Lake Heights homeowners and the utility companies was signed on May 23, 1966, and construction started on June 15, with Westinghouse Electric Corporation contributing new sub- mersible transformers and equipment. At the last minute, it was decided to underground wires for a community TV antenna as well as power and telephone lines.

All last summer the poles came tumbling down, and by September the job was finished. Cost to the in- dividual homeowners ranged some- where between $375 and $475.

To minimize destruction of land- scaping, Puget Power assigned the Pacific Tree Experts, a nursery, to work with homeowners on the re- moval and storage of plants and shrubs. Teen-age boys took on the job of trenching from the main line to homes for 50 cents a foot.

“We put money and muscle into the project,” said Jack Makus, who was president of the Lake Heights Community Association. “But more than that, we invested something of ourselves. We all know our neigh- bors better and take greater pride in our community. Sometimes I walk up my street at dusk just to take a good look a t the sunset,” he con- tinued. “I can hardly believe that removing all that clutter would im- prove the view so much.”

Another property owner who re- cently swept his horizon clean lives near Johnson City, Texas. On his ranch-the LB J-the Pedernales Electric Cooperative buried several hundred feet of utility wires. Per- haps he was persuaded by his wife, who said recently, “If ugliness is to be dissolved, Americans must do more than talk about beauty. They must act.”