Down to the wires
Six feet under. That’s where Alexandra and Mark Helfrich prefer their utility lines. Like so many homeowners, the couple seldom thought about the power lines over the backyard of their former house in Los Feliz. But that all changed two years ago.
“One windy day we heard this snap, crackle, pop outside,” Alexandra recalled. “Power lines were whipping against treetops. There was exposed current. I was sure the trees were going to catch on fire. It took three months for the city of Los Angeles to replace the power lines.” The incident was especially nerve-racking because the Helfrichs had just become parents.
So when they were shopping for a new home, underground utilities -- electrical, phone and cable -- at the Burbank Hills development “appealed to us,” Alexandra said of the home she now shares with her husband, a feature film editor, and their two children.
To most home shoppers and owners, utility poles are part of the landscape, like palm trees and convertibles. They become convenient sites to look for garage sale signs or post a notice for a lost dog. But when fierce Santa Ana winds whip through Southern California, as they did last month at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour in some areas, power wires snap and poles come down. Southern California Edison reported the winds had downed 200 poles, 29 in Arcadia alone in one day. Downed power lines also sparked fires in Malibu and on Catalina Island.
Fortunately, wind-downed poles are a relatively rare occurrence. “We have a lot more people hitting poles, especially at 2 in the morning,” said Jack Feldman, manager of transmission and distribution engineering for the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power. Insurers say they get more claims for falling tree branches than for damage from poles or wires.
Today, many Southland cities have rules mandating underground utilities. Irvine, for example, which was incorporated in 1971, is almost completely free of unsightly wires and poles. Some older communities have converted their overhead lines to buried ones. A few wealthy owners take on the huge expense themselves.
Burying utilities isn’t new. The DWP has been doing it since the 1920s, said Feldman. The first development in Los Angeles with underground utilities was a large swath of Carthay Circle, an area near La Cienega and Olympic boulevards developed by J. Harvey McCarthy between 1922 and 1944.
Newer areas on the outskirts of the city have buried utilities. So do parts of many major thoroughfares, such as Wilshire Boulevard. It wasn’t until 1966 that Los Angeles established an ordinance requiring underground installation of utilities in all new subdivisions, such as Porter Ranch and Playa Vista.
Digging into the ground is more expensive than planting poles overhead, whether it’s for a new development or converting an old one. “In some areas, it’s 10 times as much as overhead,” Feldman said. “There is no average price. But we did a little study and found out that for conversion ... a million dollars will buy three blocks.”
Michael McKinney, manager of Southern California Edison’s legislative and government affairs office, said they generally estimate “a million dollars per mile for conversion,” but the actual costs can vary dramatically depending on the terrain of the community.
Besides money, it requires political savvy and patience to move utilities underground. It can take years of bureaucratic snarl to convert, whether it involves an entire community or a single block.
Little Balboa Island, one of seven islands off Newport Beach, recently completed the process of converting from above-ground utilities to underground. The process wasn’t easy, quick or cheap. Dick Rivett, a retired machinery distributor who was instrumental in the conversion effort, said members of his tightknit community first began discussing the possibility of undergrounding in 1988. There are nearly 250 homes on Little Balboa Island, and prices start at around $1 million for a tear-down on a small lot.
“The homeowners felt it would be a good idea,” he said, “one for safety. When we had earthquakes down here years ago, we saw that trees and poles swing back and forth. Sometimes cables break. In windstorms too. We had a power line right outside our house land in the street. It could have set our house on fire.”
For residents, the first step was to start a petition drive to get signatures from a majority of Little Island homeowners to create an assessment district. Next they submitted the petition to the city, which completed a study to make sure the conversion was feasible. After that, there was a referendum by mail. Two years ago, the actual work began, with Southern California Edison serving as contractor.
Despite the cost -- the final tab was $2.1 million, or about $10,000 per household -- there were many supporters. (Homeowners had a choice of paying the fee in full or having it added to their property tax bill over 15 years. In hardship cases, Newport Beach advanced the money and put a lien on the property.)
Newport Beach Mayor Steve Bromberg, also a Little Island resident, said the long, involved process was well worth it. “Balboa Island is the highest-density community in California. So we are very compact. When you have poles it doesn’t look so great. Now it’s gorgeous.”
“It’s helped property values significantly,” said Don Abrams, another Little Island resident and owner of Rumbold Realty, which sells about a third of the few Little Island homes that come on the market each year. “It’s hard to put a number on it.”
After all, “usually homes on the Little Island sell at a premium even compared to the Big [Balboa] Island. But now I think the Little Island is that much nicer. When I show houses, I always point out to the new buyer that they’ve got this benefit.”
Michael Greenwald, an agent with Coldwell Banker Brentwood, does the same, whenever he has the chance. “Interestingly enough,” he said, “in the nicest areas of Brentwood, [the utilities] are not buried. I sell a lot of homes up in Kenter Canyon, a lot of view homes. And when you’re looking down, you’re looking at major wires and poles. You might be looking right at the ocean, but you’re looking through wires and poles. So it’s a real plus when someone does a remodel and buries.”
This can be done by individual homeowners even if their neighbors are sticking with their poles. But it can be prohibitively pricey. Brentwood resident Nancy Freedman called the DWP after a landscape architect suggested burying the lines in her expansive backyard. A DWP representative came out and gave her a quote of “tens of thousands of dollars.”
“He said a lot of people want to do it and then it gets so expensive they just forget it,” Freedman added.
Homeowners who make the investment aren’t likely to make all their money back when they decide to sell, according to agent Greenwald. Still, he said, “you definitely have a quantifiable difference in price if you were to look at apples and apples. You can’t give a dollar amount or a percentage. What you get is a perception. It’s sometimes the difference between selling a house quickly and having it on the market for a long time. There are buyers who say I don’t even want to look at a property if you’re looking at wires.”
Yet underground utilities do have a downside. Things can go wrong. Even the DWP and Southern California Edison representatives admit as much.
“Edison definitely sees a value in it from an aesthetic standpoint,” McKinney said. “But from a reliability standpoint, sometimes underground systems suffer. Sometimes it’s harder to find the problem, and they’re also harder to repair. It takes more time.”
Also, underground systems, which are generally buried a minimum of 3 to 4 feet, can have shorter life spans due to soil conditions and tree roots. Then again, sometimes they last longer than overhead. “It depends on the area,” said DWP’s Feldman. “There are just so many factors involved.”
What about safety? “Overhead systems are not inherently safer or more unsafe than an underground system,” McKinney said. “The problems are just different. With underground systems we have dig-ins, where people dig into the conduit. Usually people are doing things as simple as digging holes for trees. We also get water intrusion.”
The phone company already has had to make a repair in the alley behind Rivett’s house on Little Balboa after water seeped into the underground box. Fortunately, there was no charge to Rivett because the work was not on his property.
Whether power lines are above or below ground apparently is not a major concern to insurance companies. Robert Mitchell, a spokesman for State Farm Insurance, the largest home insurer in California, said his company doesn’t get too many calls for downed lines.
“Because it’s so rare we don’t even have a code for it. Tree branches falling on houses are a larger concern.” Still, he said, “if there were a wind-related accident due to a power line, that is a covered event.”
One seldom talked about advantage to underground utilities is important given our car-obsessed culture:. “We don’t have birds on wires anymore,” Bromberg said cheerfully. “Let me tell you what a mess that was.”
