SPARTANBURG — After Helene's tropical-storm-force winds caused catastrophic damage to the Upstate’s power infrastructure, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham floated a possible solution: Putting the lines underground.
"When we rebuild, let’s be smart about it," he said during a press conference in Aiken. "Power lines being knocked down by trees, killing people, happens way too much. So, if we can get more power lines underground, I think we’d be smart to do it."
Buried lines cost more, but he said it would be worth the money in the long run and he would do whatever he could in Congress to get federal funding for the effort.
"I think there are people that would be alive today if we'd buried power lines," Graham said. "What's that worth? That's worth a lot to me."
It's a strategy already incorporated by cities on the coast, where tropical storms and hurricanes are an annual threat, and Rock Hill, which began ramping up its burial efforts in the early 2000s, particularly after a brutal ice storm.
Likewise, Spartanburg County Councilman David Britt came out forcefully in favor of the proposal, saying the cost should be shared among local, state and federal partners.
"In 2024, we’re better than this," he said in an interview. "We need to do it, and we need to do it now."
Britt echoed Upstate officials' concerns about the danger of downed trees that wrap up power lines, recalling that after the storm, he'd been trapped in his neighborhood by downed lines.
"If we can put men and women on the moon and look at going to Mars, we can bury electric cables underground, economically," Britt said. "This is something the home front needs now."
Spartanburg Mayor Jerome Rice said the city would consider moving to underground lines and other ways to mitigate future damage.
"It's a lengthy and expensive process, but if this could save us the time and the effort in the long run, sure, we will look at it," Rice said. "We gotta try to do what's in the best interest of Spartanburg."
Most customers in the Upstate get their power from Duke Energy — even those who don't often have utilities that buy their power from Duke and rely on its transmission lines — and Duke spokesman Ryan Mosier said strategically burying only some sections of lines made more sense than burying all of them.
He noted that in Helene's aftermath, a lot of power outages were caused by damage to transmission lines that move electricity from power plants to substations before the smaller distribution lines feed power to people's homes.
"If there's no power being delivered upstream, no amount of underground will prevent a power outage, and that is the situation we faced with this event," Mosier said.
Burying lines come with a cost
After spending more than a week without power in some cases, neighborhoods across the Upstate saw their lights and air conditioning come back on only after linemen replaced their mangled lines and toppled utility poles.
Some Spartanburg County officials agreed that burying power lines could be a good idea to avoid future power outage headaches, but many also stressed the cost of such a lengthy process.
S.C. House Rep. Josiah Magnuson, who represents the rural District 38 that covers much of northern Spartanburg County, said he was open to looking at burying power lines in some areas — forested and suburban locales — but not everywhere in the state because of the cost.
"It's not something that we don't want to do — I think everybody would like to bury the power lines — but you got to pay for it," Magnuson said. "That's going to be the challenge."
A tree, utility pole and power line lie across Willard Street, a major route to downtown Clinton, S.C., and the city's government offices, on Sept. 27 amid road closures and power outages in the wake of Tropical Storm Helene.
Campobello Mayor Jason Shamis and Inman Mayor Cornelius Huff also mentioned cost as a possible barrier, even as they thought their towns should consider it.
Mayor Bob Briggs of Landrum, a community of about 2,500 near the North Carolina border, said the city buried power lines near its downtown in the early 2000s. It still went completely dark. The reason: An above-ground transmission line from a substation in Campobello to the city went down in the storm.
Are buried lines a cure-all?
Power officials say the project comes at a cost and warn there are still risks.
Mosier said building underground distribution lines, which could involve digging into asphalt and concrete, cost three to four times as much as running them above ground. For transmission lines, it's nearly 10 times the price.
"Placing all of these lines underground would be extremely cost-prohibitive, and would not generate significant enough reliability benefits to justify the cost to customers," he said.
Burying lines doesn't remove risk in its entirety, Mosier added, citing water and animal damage and the possibility that workers digging underground could hit the wires.
"And when you do experience an outage underground, it can take much longer to repair than an overhead line," Mosier said.
For example, Helene took down Spartanburg County's primary 911 communications tower. When it fell, it ripped up connected underground power lines.
Dominion Energy South Carolina President Keller Kissam told The Post and Courier that it takes six times longer to fix damaged underground lines than overhead ones. Workers have to use a machine to figure out where the damage is, then start digging up the line.
"Sometimes in the middle of the night it’s like finding a needle in a haystack," he explained.
Mosier said improving the power grid and upgrading power lines and utility poles would be a better use of Duke's money.
He also said the company was installing "self-healing" technology to help customers get power back quicker by rerouting power through lines that weren't damaged.
"This technology can often reduce the number of customers affected by an outage by as much as 75 percent and can often restore power in less than a minute," Mosier added.
In Aiken, Graham conceded that burying lines may not be "the perfect answer." But, he said, "if you drive down between here and Seneca, you're going to see power lines down. Well, what if they're underground? I think that they'd be working."
A number of South Carolina cities are burying their lines without regret. All of them cite different benefits, but there's a common refrain: buried lines are more reliable.
Rock Hill's ice storm
The city of Rock Hill is its own provider, buying power wholesale from the Duke-owned Catawba Nuclear Plant as well as Santee Cooper.
When Deputy City Manager Jimmy Bagley joined the city in 1989, it was already burying power lines in new developments and wherever old lines were getting upgraded, mainly for aesthetic purposes.
In the early 2000s, the city began ramping up the effort after City Council realized the newer neighborhoods with buried lines weren’t losing power like the areas with overhead lines.
And then in 2005, an ice storm began snapping trees and downing power lines all over town. Lines were coming down even as crews were out in the frigid weather trying to keep the power on.
"That was when instead of spending a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, we started spending like a million," Bagley said.
Since then, Rock Hill has spent $500,000 to $1 million each year to bury lines in several neighborhoods. The payoff is fewer outages, fewer poles for drivers to hit, a cleaner aesthetic and higher property values.
Now, about 60 percent of the city's lines are underground.
"It's a no-brainer to me,” Bagley said. "I think you’ll find the cities are more likely to do it as opposed to the Duke Powers of the world, just because they’re trying to send all their money back to their shareholders."
A snapped electricity pole with remains along Highway SC-101 Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Greer.
Conway's downtown project
Conway has embarked on a yearslong project and will soon start the sixth phase to finish downtown before moving up Main Street.
"It's a royal pain in the neck, but it’s so much better when it's over," City Manager Adam Emrick said.
During Hurricane Matthew in 2016, most of downtown lost power, but it was on soon after the storm left. In places where the lines weren't buried, however, they became so entangled with downed trees that power was out for weeks.
The process of burying lines is complicated and expensive. It requires years of planning with the state Department of Transportation and utility companies and acquiring easements.
Emrick noted that a recent phase of burying lines along a half-mile of road cost $8 million, but he thinks it's worth the cost.
A business closing down for a few days without power could mean the difference between surviving or failing, he said. It's also a boon for economic development.
"When we remove the power lines, we see an immediate investment from the private side to improve that area," Emrick said. "We see buildings get rehabbed, we see people move into the neighborhood."
He rattled off other benefits: fewer linemen have to respond to devastated areas, utility poles no longer pose a risk to errant drivers and without them, it's easier to change the focus of street lighting to pedestrian use and encourage more walkable road design.
"The overhead lines are dated," Emrick said. "We need to get rid of 'em."
Public safety in North Myrtle Beach
A half-hour down the road, the city of North Myrtle Beach has been burying lines since 2014.
City Councilwoman Nikki Fontana recalled losing power at her Windy Hill home for only a few days during Hurricane Matthew in a section of beach where the lines had been buried. But her constituents where lines weren't buried were still without power a week later.
"We get winds that are all the way up to 100 miles per hour," Fontana said. "At 50 miles per hour, we pull our emergency personnel off the road. You're dealing with winds up to a 100, of course they’re going to knock those power lines out."
But when the lines are underground, the lights come back on quicker.
"If the power does go out," she said, "they're just flipping the grids back on."
Fontana pointed to other public safety benefits as well.
Buried lines mean that there are no live wires threatening to fall on firefighters working calls during the storm, and because there are fewer traffic signals that go out, the city doesn’t have to send officers to direct traffic.
That's a particularly salient point in Spartanburg. During Helene-linked power outages, two people died after a driver failed to treat a stop light without power as a four-way stop.
North Myrtle Beach hasn’t finished burying its lines, but it plans to keep investing in the endeavor.
"I think there's a huge significance in getting them back and running when they’re buried," Fontana said.
Bigger problems to worry about?
Rajendra Singh, an electrical engineering professor at Clemson University, agreed that buried power lines are more reliable than overhead power lines since trees cannot fall on them and disrupt the flow of electricity.
His own subdivision's power lines are buried, so he never lost power during Helene.
However, as a practical matter, Singh had concerns about the cost of burying power lines and how the process would be funded, explaining that federal funding can be tricky and that the state might have to bear the cost.
Ultimately though, Singh said changing how power is distributed does little to address the root cause of increasingly dangerous storms: a reliance on fossil fuels that leads to climate change and more extreme weather.
"Yeah, sure, you (spend) some money, some life will be better," Singh said. "But you cannot 100 percent remove the problem because of the way power is generated."
Aiken Standard reporter Carl Dawson contributed to this report.
