CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, Va. — Kelly Barton has witnessed decades of changes in his Chesterfield neighborhood since his parents first purchased their home in the early 1980s. But one recent upgrade has made a dramatic difference in his quality of life, even though it's no longer visible from the road.
Barton and several of his neighbors have had their power lines moved underground as part of Dominion Energy's Strategic Underground Program, significantly reducing power outage times.
"I don't remember which hurricane it was but we lost power and it took over two and half weeks to get it back," Barton said.
The difference is striking for residents who previously endured lengthy outages.
"We find the difference in what we have today very noticeable," Barton said.
The benefits were immediately apparent during a recent family dinner. "My son and his wife were visiting last week and we had just sat down for dinner and the power went out and they said, uh oh, bring out the candles and about three seconds later, the power's back on," Barton said.
Craig Carper with Dominion Energy explains that while underground lines don't eliminate outages completely, they drastically reduce their duration.
"The undergrounding doesn't necessarily mean that you never lose power at all, but typically, I mean, in relative terms, it's a blink," Carper said.
The program was developed following decades of increasingly severe weather and a state study identifying areas experiencing the worst power outages.
Dominion uses data to prioritize which neighborhoods receive underground lines. "Where can we do the most good? What you know? Where do we have the capacity to work on this, and where does it make the most sense? And so we are looking in a data-driven way," Carper said.
Fallen trees and branches contacting overhead power lines are the primary cause of outages, making tree-dense neighborhoods top candidates for the program.
When lines go underground, utility poles don't always disappear. "Once undergrounding happens. It doesn't necessarily mean that the poles come down, because there are typically other things on there. There's, you know, fiber optic cable, telecom," Carper said.
The company has undergrounded about 2,500 miles of power lines since launching the program 11 years ago. Progress is limited by cost, resources and labor requirements.
"We're thinking that over the life of this project, we'll underground somewhere in the realm of 20 to 25% of the lines that were previously overhead," Carper said. "In the last 11 years, we have been undergrounding about 1% of our overhead network per year."
Before installation begins in a neighborhood, Dominion surveys customers and informs them of the modest cost increase on their monthly bills.
"It comes down to a few dollars a month forever for the average customer's bill," Carper said. The actual construction process is relatively quick: "The actual work of coming into these neighborhoods and doing the undergrounding. We can knock it out in about a week."
The benefits extend beyond individual neighborhoods, helping reduce outage times across the system.
"Where restoration lasts longer than 72 hours, we can cut those times up to in half," Carper said. "Every storm is different. It's not going to be perfect, but we are seeing significant, you know, a significant shortening of restoration times for from all of our major storms."
With hurricane season beginning June 1, Dominion reminds customers they can report power outages through their app or by calling 1-866-DOM-HELP. Customers can also use this number to check if their neighborhood is scheduled for an upcoming undergrounding project.
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