We are doing everything we can to 'protect' our home/living area and are essentially starting from scratch since we have to re-do so much.

More details will be posted once we get started on the process.

I definitely think underground power lines is a plus. Also a lot of us need to stay prepared for the normal disasters in our area (on top of the new ones). For instance, one of my friends has a dome house he built from (http://www.aidomes.com/) and that thing is been through heck and back, he had a tornado spinning on the roof for 30 minutes before it darted off and destroyed 3 homes near him, been through hurricanes,fire and minor flooding and it's still standing strong after 25 years. If it wasn't so dang ugly, I can't con the misses into building one, she would rather keep rebuilding after major hurricanes or what have you instead of a fortress like that. He has a 18KW generator vs the little 12.5KW we have here so we go to his place it all heck breaks loose. All of his water is distilled through a commercial grade distillery system (which I can't stand the taste with no minerals) but all of his water is from wells,rain and ocean. All he has to worry about is food and the dome house stays cool here in Fla without the AC most all year around. His typical electric bill is $30 a month, but I can't con him into solar.

I think the future needs more reinforced homes that exceed that of a dome house like the "EYE of the storm" dome house (on the news in Pensacola)which made it through storm surges on the beach with no problems. This and self sufficient energy and water production is a must.

I've lived in several neighborhoods with underground power cables and you still lose power. In fact, our current neighborhood loses power quite frequently.

The reason is that underground cables go above ground someplace and your vulnerable there. In our case, I can walk 1/2 mile and see where our neighborhood's cable emerges, goes up a pole, then through a wooded area for a mile to the substation. It's the trees and branches in the woods that kill our power.

So, you have to look at the whole system. The system will fail at the weakest point.

But, let me ask a silly question. Is the choice really only between underground and the present above ground installations? Is it not possible to "harden" the above ground wires, poles, connections etc. to a higher standard so that the system can stand up to the winds etc.? If IzzyJG99 can harden the roof of a house with some nails and liquid nail here and there, surely we can harden the wires hanging on the poles. . . can't we?

Yes, we could do that. The system in Japan is designed to withstand powerful earthquakes and typhoons and much of it is above ground. They don't use wooden power poles there. I guess they're steel reinforced concrete poles, from what I can tell. The average US electrical customer sees far more minutes of blackout than your average European or Japanese customer. (From a survey I read in the news a couple years ago--sorry, no reference for it).

Or even here in the US, from what I've read, the quality of electrical components in certain regions of the country, like the Southwest, are higher than in others. E.g. the kind of heat that causes transformers to blow up and transmission lines to melt down due to high demand in a New York heat wave don't bother the equipment in, say, Phoenix.

Of course, the real crux is money. Are we, as electrical customers, willing to pay more every single month for all this extra robustness? The popularity of discount big box stores like Walmart leads me to say, "No, I want cheap power". Plus, with privatization and the breaking up of power generation and distribution across separate companies makes the cost of such upgrades that much harder to bear by the smaller companies that actually own the equipment.

I can see the inability to get insurance as a de-facto implementation of this idea.

While i agree with most of what you have listed here is a problem mandating substantial retrofit upgrades for building codes. Friends of mine just received a quote to re-roof the 40+ year old house that they live in and it was $50K. Most of the cost was labor to rip off the existing 3/4 plank roof that is there now and upgrading the structure to current code. I have been in the attic of this house and it is a very well made roof, i would not think twice about staying under that roof during a storm. Now they are seriously considering having a "weekend" roof put on. As in no building permits at all, of course this would only save them $45K.

And i have seen this often back when i had a hardware store, when the local building enforcement establishment is expensive or difficult to deal with people cheat. And when people don't get permits and have work done the workers tend to skimp and not do a very good job because it's not going to be inspected. So by raising the bar have you truly made things safer?

Now having said all of this if i was building a house the roof would be laid with 3/4 water resistant subfloor ply using glue and the new evil looking roof deck nails. 30# felt on top of that with smooth shingles or a metal roof. I don't want to touch anything on the roof for at least twenty years.

What is a smooth shingle?

Putting power cables underground certainly helps, and IMHO should be done, especialy in places prone to storms or hurricanes. However it does not eliminate power cuts by any means, the high voltage grid lines that transmit power in bulk can not be readily or affordably put underground and remain vulnerable to storm damage. The risks can be reduced by reinforced construction, and duplicated routes.

Small grid transformers if mounted on or below ground level are vulnerable to flooding. They generally consist of a steel tank in which the transformer is immersed in oil.
Such transformers will continue to work just fine in a flood provided that the water does not reach the top of the tank, if this occurs it is liable to go bang, either because water got into the oil, or because the connections went under water.

Here in the UK transformers are much larger, and fewer in number, than in the USA. They are generally placed in small purpose built brick sheds, the top of the transformer is often about 5 feet above ground level and therefore only vulnerable to very deep floods. In areas that flood repeatedly the transformer and related switchgear is sometimes raised on a concrete plinth.

However in central London these transformers are often in basements, and a number of localised blackouts have been caused by floods, either from storms or from burst water mains.

It's all about the money. You can take many meassures to make the world more disasterproof. But are people willing to pay for it? The simple fact is that govermants and company's only have a limited budget for various importent issues and company's abviously want to make a profit. More funding for one issue, means less for another one.

I don't think a normal citizen can do much about the powerlines. It all depends on the intire infrastucture.

"...pay 3,500 to put the cables underground..."

I suspect that it would cost a tad more than that to put powerlines underground. Our stick house is on a well, we talked about hooking into "city" water a while back. We would have to pay the PUD over $3500 just to tie into the water main in the street, and another $5000 or so to have a contractor trench and install 'bout 250 ft of line to our house.

What I don't understand is why all new construction doesn't have underground power. It would be much easier, which equals cheaper, to do it before all of the paving and concrete work is in place...