Dominion Energy’s latest cycle of tree-trimming to protect power lines from blowing limbs during heavy winds continues to draw ire from Lowcountry residents, many of whom suggested power lines should be buried below ground to better serve the native trees that line many Charleston corridors.
“Keeping the natural resources intact is … what everybody wants,” said South Windermere resident (and former neighborhood president) Susan Pearlstine. “There’s just no easy way to get there.”
Dominion Energy contracts arborists every five years to cut tree branches to keep power lines clear, seeking to keep lines from being damaged during storms. When tree limbs and other vegetation make contact with overhead power lines, lights sometimes flicker, or even worse, power may fail completely, according to Dominion.
“While we understand and appreciate the passion surrounding trees across the Lowcountry, safety remains our top priority,” Dominion spokesman Paul Fischer said in an April 26 report. “Hazardous vegetation that has grown too close to energized lines is not only a fire hazard, but also an issue of public safety.”
Why not bury the lines?
Pearlstine and several other residents suggest burying the power lines, so tree limbs would no longer threaten power or safety. But it isn’t that simple, Charleston City Councilman Ross Appel said in an interview.
“Going back decades, the city has had an agreement with SCANA, now Dominion,” he explained. “The city and the utility worked out this agreement where a portion of the city’s franchising would go toward funding these non-standard undergrounding projects. Under that ordinance, in order for a neighborhood to underground their lines, it was an enormously complicated process.”
The process included almost-total buy-in from neighborhood residents — and they were on the hook for a portion of the cost. Between 2017 and 2019, Dominion worked to convert overhead utility lines to underground lines from Wingo Way to Bowman Road along Mathis Ferry Road in Mount Pleasant. The final cost of the three-phase project was estimated to be $1,260,000, or about $600,000 per mile.
Cost estimates for undergrounding projects vary widely across the U.S., with cost-per-mile estimates for one South Dakota project falling around $11,000. Another project in California estimated costs anywhere between $1,850,000 and $6,100,000 per mile.
Fischer added that water issues — all-too common in many Lowcountry neighborhoods — also contribute to the difficulty and cost of these projects.
“Every neighborhood is unique and would require a thorough feasibility and engineering study to determine the true scope of work, including cost estimates,” he said. “In some instances, it simply may not be practical or possible to put lines underground.”
Some changes, but not enough
In 2020, the City of Charleston formed a task force to address the bureaucratic challenges associated with these projects. Appel served on that task force.
“We amended the service ordinance to allow for smaller projects to be completed,” he said. “Rather than wait for entire neighborhoods to come in line, we could bang out a street here, a street there, and start building momentum.
That was a nudge in the right direction, he said, but it hasn’t been enough.
“The pace of this is so glacial that it’s hard to know that anything is getting done at all,” Appel said. “The bottom line is even notwithstanding all the challenges, there’s no excuse for the lack of projects happening. We have to find a better way to do this.”
Appel said he’s looking to reopen the conversation.
“Dominion needs to be putting more resources, more priority, more in the game on this stuff,” he said. “What they would tell you is that this is going to cost a fortune, we’d have to raise rates and all this, but maybe that’s a conversation we need to have. We just need more buy-in from everybody to get this done so it’s less like swimming upstream.”
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