WHY IS POWER UP IN THE AIR?

As emergency crews are working overtime to restore power to hundreds of thousands of households, I am sure Nova Scotia Power wants us to believe that these outages are acts of God — unfortunate but unavoidable side-effects of a rare natural disaster.

We may ask: are there widespread water outages? Gas outages? Why not? Does drinking water or natural gas get delivered to your house via pipes that dangle from poles by the side of the road, and that break every time a tree branch falls on them? Of course not. So why is the power utility still permitted to deliver electricity via cables dangling in the air? It is time to require all electrical services to be undergrounded, at least in urban areas. This requirement could be phased in over the next 20 to 30 years.

Peter Selinger, Halifax, N.S.