baltimore-DC area was hit by a hurricane about 10 months ago, and had a near identical outage&response to what we're seeing this week. people with power out for 3-7 days, communication sporadic, centralized/managed sources of ice/water/etc generally minimal if existing at all. AND, this time it's been averaging 95-100F, whereas last year it was actually pleasant having the windows open and no AC going.
The local authority 'investigated' the local utility's response. don't recall the outcome. but now, less than a year later, and we have almost the same level of damage, and same response time... maybe the latter makes sense. (we'd have done better than last time with at the same warning as last time). but why is the level of outage the same? Maybe that's what needs to be investigated. shouldn't a good hurricane have taken out most of the weak spots last year? did the hurricane create new weak spots that this storm caused to fail? Having grown up in an area with predominantly buried power lines, are there any preventative ways other than burying lines that can help? What about identifying certain projects to bury lines that frequently fail? A 'greatest net benefit' analysis?