More than 60 years ago, residents in some of Seattle’s richest neighborhoods asked the city to bury their power lines so they wouldn’t have to look at poles and wires. Now the cables are falling apart, The Seattle Times reported. The fix could cost $2 billion, and KIRO host Gee Scott said everyone needs to understand why the past matters.
“Sometimes people say, ‘Well, why do we talk about the past?’ Because it’s the past, and the stuff that we see today is because of decisions that were made yesterday,” Gee said on “The Gee and Ursula Show” on KIRO Newsradio. “Decisions to beautify these neighborhoods in the ’60s. Here we are in 2026, and the bill is due. And so the bill is due, and all of the equity that has been gained in these places. I don’t know if you guys noticed or not, but the median price in Seattle for a home is $900,000.”
In the 1960s, residents in neighborhoods like Laurelhurst, Madison Park, Magnolia, and Queen Anne petitioned the city to bury their electrical lines. The cables were buried directly into the wet Seattle soil without protective conduit. Now, 60 years later, those cables are deteriorating and causing long, repeated outages, according to The Seattle Times. Seattle City Light estimates that replacing all 330 miles of aging underground cable could cost $2 billion, a cost that would likely be spread across the utility’s entire customer base through higher rates…