Dive Summary:
- Nearly a fourth of Southern California Edison’s (SCE) 1.4 million utility poles are dangerously overloaded and fail safety requirements, a recent study commissioned by SCE found.
- Concerns over a series of fires and outages from downed poles drove the utility to survey poles throughout its 50,000-square mile service territory. Out of 5,006 poles investigated, 22.3% did not meet utility safety requirements. SCE used this sampling to determine that 313,000 of its poles are in urgent need of repair or replacement.
- "In this case, we really want to get ahead of the game and tackle the problem while we can, before it's too late, before we start seeing some real problems in our infrastructure," SCE spokesman David Song told the press. SCE plans to spend $1 billion to examine, replace and repair its poles.
From the article:
"The utility co-owns most of its poles with others, such as telecommunications companies, that use the poles for their own equipment and share responsibility for them."