The water table in Houston is less than a foot below ground, making line burial impossible, and with almost 7 million residents, economically infeasible. Trees are not the problem since Houston has few trees.
Like most underprovisioned (and under-designed) metro areas, Houston's only solution is to modularize its neighborhoods into independent services that can quickly switch to alternative sources of power, thereby rerouting around damage while it's being repaired. The absolutely worst model is the one they have now -- to remove all ability to route demand dynamically through as many external partners as possible, thereby minimizing their vulnerability to single points of catastropic failure. This needs to extend not only to out-of-state power sources but also to in-state and in-city multipoint forms of routing and even power generation.
Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. THAT's what's needed most. And the cooperative spirit to do what's necessary -- something Texas lacks in SPADES.
Like most underprovisioned (and under-designed) metro areas, Houston's only solution is to modularize its neighborhoods into independent services that can quickly switch to alternative sources of power, thereby rerouting around damage while it's being repaired. The absolutely worst model is the one they have now -- to remove all ability to route demand dynamically through as many external partners as possible, thereby minimizing their vulnerability to single points of catastropic failure. This needs to extend not only to out-of-state power sources but also to in-state and in-city multipoint forms of routing and even power generation.
Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. THAT's what's needed most. And the cooperative spirit to do what's necessary -- something Texas lacks in SPADES.