Jamie Tobias Neely: Bury power lines in areas where possible
The darkness exploded around 5:15 that Tuesday night. For days, I thought it coincided with the moment our neighbors’ tree slammed into their garage and broke through their backdoor across the street.
The wind roared through the South Hill that night, transformers boomed and sparked, and sirens wailed. Now and then, I peered into the backyard to watch our hulking ponderosa pine sway dangerously in the wind.
As the dark and cold stretched on, we had plenty of time to speculate, my neighbors and I. The damage in our 99203 ZIP code was incomprehensible. How could we prevent it from happening again?
I eyed my monster pine by day. For years I’d been protecting it. But I began to wonder. If it were between that tree and me, it was the tree that had to go.
Perhaps I view wind differently than Spokane natives do. I grew up in South Dakota and graduated from the University of Wyoming. In those states, the wind blows incessantly, and the power lines are safely buried underground. I remember long blizzards, yes, but no power outages in my childhood.
Surely we can figure out how to prevent these dangerous conditions from happening again in Spokane.
On Tuesday, Jim Flott, owner of Community Forestry Consultants, was still without power in the Hamblen area, and he was pondering ways to grill a turkey outdoors.
But give him a few weeks, he said. He’ll be “crazy busy,” investigating tree failures for attorneys and insurance companies. Flott’s the CSI of arborists in this city, he joked.
He suggested I wait a minute on my Frankenstein of a ponderosa. Chop down Spokane’s remaining pines, and we’ll suddenly look like Central Washington.
Most of the trees that fell during the windstorm were actually healthy, he said. It was soil failure, not tree failure, that caused the damage.
That’s because we have sandy, rocky soil, and we overwater our yards. When that soil gets wet, the tree becomes more vulnerable. Flott recommends that homeowners ask an experienced, certified arborist to not only inspect the health of remaining trees, but also look for soil fractures around their bases.
Flott estimates the South Hill’s trees are 80 to 90 years old. They can live 200 to 300 years.
The trees transform carbon dioxide into oxygen for us, improving our air and water quality and helping to reduce climate change. They cool our homes in the summer and boost our property values.
The power was out at our house for five nights. The first 24 hours can feel like a camping trip in your living room. But the fun quickly wears off. By day five, we stopped in for lunch at Huckleberry’s on Monroe Street, where we found the powerless hunched over bowls of soup, eyes dazed and feral. We resembled the survivors of a zombie invasion. We needed our power on – RIGHT NOW!
By the time those valiant line workers restored ours last Sunday, it occurred to me: It probably wasn’t the tree across the street that cut off our electricity.
It’s more likely we were connected to the family a block away on the same side of the street. At that house, the mother told KREM TV news afterward, a tree broke off and shot straight down through the roof and the hardwood floors, and into the basement. It cut through the baby’s crib. The mother was wearing her infant son in a carrier in the kitchen as she cooked dinner. The rest of the family also was unharmed by the tree. Miraculous.
“Once they break free, they’re like spears coming down from the sky,” Flott said.
This winter windstorm, with speeds up to 71 mph measured at Spokane International Airport – only 6 mph short of the strongest gust ever recorded in Spokane – was historic. The 1996 ice storm was considered a 100-year storm.
Avista’s Jessie Wuerst, senior communications manager, says she’s seen estimates as high as $10 billion to bury our underground power lines. The work would be hampered by existing buildings and the basalt underlying them.
And yet. For the sake of that baby down the street, the little guy who survived the windstorm in his mom’s carrier, we’ve got to figure this out.
Many of us here in the storm’s Ground Zero have been dreaming of underground power lines for nights now.
We’ll have to work toward a compromise. Perhaps lines can be buried as the city rips up streets for improvement and others gradually added to old neighborhoods. Individual trees that have been significantly weakened by the storm must come down. We’ll all have to pay higher rates and get better at preparing for emergencies.
Together, let’s put an end to the dark nights of the thousands of souls here in the 99203 and beyond.
Jamie Tobias Neely, a former member of The Spokesman-Review’s editorial board, is an associate professor of journalism at Eastern Washington University. Her email address is jamietobiasneely@comcast.net.