Repetitive Debate of the Day: Why Hasn't Washington, D.C. Buried its Power Lines?

The most hated company in America, the D.C. area electric utility Pepco, has been getting its fair share of extra hate this week in the wake of a days-long mass power outage following last weekend's powerful "derecho" thunderstorm. It's a crappy situation for the more than one million homes and business that have suffered from outages across the region, but it's familiar crap. Exactly these sorts of prolonged outages happen at least once or twice, if not more often, every summer in Washington.

Just as these power outages are nothing new, the debate surrounding what to do about them is your basic broken record. Pepco has long blamed the severity of outages in its service area on the high percentage of its above-ground power lines that are situated near trees, especially in upper Northwest Washington and neighboring Montgomery County, Maryland. But the utility has never taken what many locals see as the most obvious step toward addressing the problem: burying the damn power lines under ground.