Floridians know the drill: Hurricane season hits, big storms take down power lines and residents are left without electricity.
Now, some neighborhoods that get their power from Tampa Electric Co. — from Hyde Park to Winter Haven — are seeing big trucks rumble onto their streets to take those lines underground and out of the way of the winds.
It’s a process not always without initial headaches, residents say, even though they look forward to the future payoff.
Construction takes months and the trucks can seem ever-present on narrow neighborhood streets. Customers are asked to give workers access to their property, and some end up with boxy equipment installed in their yards. Lawns get staked with small colored flags that can make mowing a challenge.
“Headache in the beginning,” said Twanda Bradley, president of the civic council in Progress Village, a community southeast of Tampa. “Getting past that, not having outages is going to be huge — it’ll be a win for us in the end.”
In Forest Hills on Tampa’s north side, residents initially didn’t get what was going on. “We had gone through two months of ‘why are they doing this?’” said Bev Kieny, president of the neighborhood civic association. Then came a well-attended community meeting with Tampa Electric representatives, maps and information. “That really helped so many people understand,” she said.
Residents there were pleased to be one of the first neighborhoods for the underground work “because of how many times we have been down without power,” she said.
By law, utilities are required to have a 10-year plan for better withstanding storms. Tampa Electric says about half of its power lines are already underground, mostly in areas of new construction and paid for by developers.
According to utility spokesperson Cherie Jacobs, the company’s goal is to convert up to 100 miles of its roughly 6,000 miles of overhead lines to underground yearly. Duke Energy Florida removed 26 miles of overhead lines in 2023 and plans to remove 61 more this year.
Tampa Electric spends about $150 million a year on its Storm Protection Plan, which includes undergrounding lines as well as trimming trees and strengthening power poles.
Here’s how undergrounding works, according to Tampa Electric:
The power company identifies lines most prone to outages. The utility seeks easem*nts from residents — the right to access private property — so it can install and maintain equipment. Cable is put into the ground using directional drilling rather than open trenching or digging, according to the company.
In some cases, a boxlike transformer averaging 34 inches high and 40 inches wide or a smaller piece of equipment is installed on residential property, which not everyone loves.
“In neighborhoods with small yards, some residents have been hesitant to commit to placing equipment on their property,” said Jacobs, “but they typically support the project overall.”
Finally, there’s a scheduled power outage to energize the new underground cable, which usually lasts four hours or less, according to Tampa Electric. Overhead lines are taken down, and crews remove poles and restore whatever might have been damaged in the process, such as landscaping, the utility says.
Residents who refuse to participate are left with lines over their homes. But Jacobs called that “rare” and said the company has “seen overwhelming support for the project.”
So if overhead power lines are vulnerable to weather, why weren’t they installed below ground in the first place?
“The primary reason is that the Public Service Commission requires utilities to provide power at the lowest possible cost to customers,” said Jacobs, “which in most cases is overhead construction.”
While out of the way of the winds, underground lines can also be more susceptible to water incursion from storm surge and flooding in certain areas, experts say.
”Undergrounding is a strategy and it’s best employed as a targeted strategy, ” said Ted Kury, director of energy studies for the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida. “One of the unfortunate things we deal with is there is no way to completely insulate the grid with interaction with the environment.”
In Progress Village, Pat Stewart has served as the neighborhood’s liaison in the undergrounding process.
“Right now, I’m looking at quite a lot of trucks down my street,” she said last month. “They’re still drilling and placing the wires. It’s a lot of crews.”
Once, one of those big trucks parked outside her house, leaving her little room to maneuver her car out of her driveway. And once, a piece of heavy equipment — a ditch digger — was left in the neighborhood on a weekend. Teenagers got on it, playing around and honking the horn, she said. After a call, the equipment was picked up.
But overall, Stewart thinks the workers have been efficient.
“I know it’s for the best, so I have no qualms with it,” she said. “I will be glad when it is completed.”
