I still remember our’s from 1960, FEderal 1 3131, now I can barely remember my current number.
As far as Florida utilities, much of electric transmissision is above ground, hurricane force winds blow tree limbs into the power lines. Hurricane can generate tornadoes, then have the opportunity of other disruptions to the power grid.
Took me nearly two years to get the VA to drop my land line number!
In my area the utilities (electrical and cable/telephone) are buried. And our builder put in a chase from the home to the utility box just in case a new line had to be run.
Our area dates from the build up for the Mercury program, all utilities above ground. ATT&T-Mobile just put in underground internet service.
I’ve been to South America several times for work in the past. Really interesting to see 10 story buildings built 80 years ago that did NOT have indoor plumbing. Plumbing wasn’t added until the 60’s or even 70’s
All our utilities in my area are above ground…
AT&T just upgraded to fiber here, it runs from the Pole to the house underground… lol
We loose power about 8 times more on average in my neighbor hood than the rest of the greater Nashville area according to their website due to trees and an older grid, NES normally restores power in a few hours, but still–needs to be upgraded, or I need to install a backup generator one… 
My neighborhood’s utilities are underground, but the electric and cable are above ground along the state road that feeds our neighborhood. We had a derecho about 10 years ago and power was out for about half of my neighborhood for around 10 days. Unfortunately, I was in the lost power zone. The good news is that the derecho blew down most of the limbs near the power lines. The remainder were removed by the power company. No power outages for quite a while after that.
Most new neighborhoods built around where I live are putting the utilities underground. The builder gets some kind of financial incentive to do so. Utility companies love it because they are easier to maintain (no cutting back of tree limbs, or falling trees to worry about or falling telephone poles - etc.etc
Underground electric ppwer can also be problematic. The underground high voltage transmission line that feeds the transformer mounted in a case on the ground that.supplies power to.my.house and several other homes faulted to ground twice leaving us without power. This happened in good weather. The first time we were without power for two days.
Didn’t say they’re without problems. But I guarantee you the problems with above ground wiring far exceed underground wiring. Utility companies wouldn’t be paying building contractors to bury the wires if they were losing money.
We’re mostly underground. Some years ago we came home and half the lights were off for the sitter. A gopher had chewed through one of the 120v lines so that part feeding half the power box was off. They used what they called a thumper to find the break. High voltage through the line and some how blew up through the ground at the break. I prefer underground.
Oh Jeez, another regionalism! Please enlighten us what a derecho is…
It’s “A severe, straight-line windstorm caused by clusters of downbursts, capable of producing hurricane-force winds over hundreds of miles.”
Weathermen started using that term here about 10 years ago.
Yeah I didn’t know what that was either until explained here a couple years ago. We just called it straight line winds. Couple years ago strong enough to uproot a couple evergreens.
That sounds like what our weathermen call a Microburst.
Like that, but much bigger, a cluster of them, can extend over 100 miles.
Here’s an example from 2020:
I don’t think we get those here in the Northeast. A microburst is extremely rare.
Seems that TN has had some of those derecho thingy’s but very rarely… We have more tornado’s than anything like that… I think it was 2021 that we had 97 in the state, and the most on record was in 2011 with 125… what makes it so bad is we are the number 1 state for night time tornado’s, around 50% are at night…
Several counties in NJ experienced damaging Microbursts during the past week.
You should worry about the 50% during the day. Last one here was in 2018. Took me a month to clean it all up. First one here in 70 years. Can’t remember if day or night. Maybe late afternoon. A relative from Norway was staying at our cabin during a wind storm. Shaking in his boots. Don’t have those in Norway for some reason.
