Pasadena Underground Program

The Underground Program began in 1968 with a goal to beautify Pasadena and restore the scenic views of the San Gabriel Mountains (Photo – PWP)

A few weeks ago, my neighbors saved my house and probably our neighborhood from burning down.

By Cheryl Auger

The electric line powering our home caught on fire and, thankfully, my neighbor saw this happen and she and her husband put the fire out.

The line was completely fried as were many of our appliances. Many of the current and historical fires are caused by downed or severed electric lines. Quite interestingly, we bought our home in 1999, and at that time one of our neighbors lamented over the Pasadena underground program for electrical wires. You probably never have heard of this, but in 1968 Pasadena initiated a project to underground all electrical wires for safety and beautification. The project goal is to underground .5 to .7 miles of electrical wires each year, and to date Pasadena has buried 46 miles of wires in the last 56 years. I am not sure how many of these fires could have been avoided if utilities spent more time and money on undergrounding, but there’s a case to be made that undergrounding utilities, especially those that put us in harm’s way, needs to be accelerated and prioritized. Many people remember the Paradise Fire, but there have been hundreds of fires caused by above-the-ground utility lines including the well known fire in Maui.

In addition, the way the utilities structure net metering for residential solar systems needs to change. While we have solar installed on our house, we can’t use it even though the power was out for days. All of the energy we produce goes to the grid bypassing our home. When we aren’t connected to the grid, the energy goes nowhere which is absurd when people don’t have power. This needs to change. If our house does not have utility supplied power and we have a residential solar system, we should be able to use that energy and to share it locally.