A review of major outages by state since the year 2000 showed Virginia ranked seventh behind Texas, Michigan, California, North Carolina, Ohio and Louisiana.
At Virginia Tech’s Advanced Research Institute, Professor Saifur Rahman says our high voltage transmission lines are pretty strong, but the distribution system that supplies neighborhoods and homes leaves many customers in the dark.
“More than 90% of the outages happen at the distribution level – where we live, not the transmission level, because transmission lines are well-designed and highly protected. The distribution lines are not," he explains.
Rahman says communities would do well to bury their power lines, but homeowners often resist that idea.
“You must have transformers on the ground, on the grass. They transform the higher voltage to our home voltage. If flooding happens, then the transformer can be flooded. When it’s flooded it’s out of service.”
And people argue the presence of a large green metal box in the front yard reduces the value of their property. Raman says state regulators should be thinking about catastrophic weather of all kinds and pressing utilities to act.
Rahman advises us to “hope for the best and prepare for the worst!"
