Editor:

[The following is an open letter to Kennebunk Light and Power]

Late last year, you received approval from the Maine legislature, and then by popular vote from the people of Kennebunk, to become our power supplier. The last I heard was that you were willing to take on the remainder of the town as power customers, but CMP had refused to sell the power poles, lines, and associated equipment to you. I haven’t heard much about the subject for the last couple of months, but I sure thought about it a lot when we lost our power down here in Lower Village during the December ice storm. 

I’m aware that the CMP line crews, and other crews from outside the state who were called in worked long, hard and effectively to restore power to thousands of customers in Maine who were without power, some, like us in Lower Village, for three or four days, others for longer periods of time. In no way would I sell short the job they did to get everyone back on line while the weather was pretty cold, and people were digging out their generators and firing up their woodstoves to keep their houses at livable temperatures. In some cases, like mine, we also had no water since we’re on a well. Although the line crews did an exemplary job to get people back on line as quickly as they did, at the time I couldn’t help thinking that we might have been on line just a little sooner if we were being serviced by a power company who lives in our backyard.

My point in writing this letter is to actually make a suggestion, even though I realize that for every complex problem, there’s a simple answer that’s usually wrong. On the off chance that perhaps my suggestion makes some sense, I offer it up. During the power outage I began to think of how the problem of running power to houses might be done differently, in a way that would eliminate most power outages, and perhaps even beautify our town. If we were starting from scratch to install power lines to houses now, would we do it the same way? My lot here in Lower Village is heavily wooded, and because of my reluctance to cut down more trees than I absolutely had to, we ran the power underground from the pole to the house. I’m sure that has saved me many power outages over the 18 years we’ve lived here, because many tree branches have fallen where the wires would have been strung. What I’m suggesting of course is, that you might be able to solve both the problem of a high maintenance lines and poles being knocked down by falling tree limbs (not to mention the squirrels and lightning who attack the transformers), and the problem of CMP not selling you their distribution system in one bold stroke. You might put in your own distribution system for those Kennebunkers who still have no choice but to be CMP customers, and put it underground. Perhaps the cost could be shared with the cable and telephone companies who could partner with you to use the same network.

I was about to file the idea with most of my other good ideas, when I read an article about exactly this subject in the March 2009 issue of Downeast Magazine. It’s in the North by East section on page 14 under the title “Wired Maine.” The article mentions some advantages to burying power lines and that it is common practice in some European countries. When the magazine contacted CMP about the possibility, their spokesperson kind of blew it off when she said that it would be very costly because “most of Maine has granite just under the surface, blasting would be required in most places, and it would cost about 10 times as much as running the lines on poles, or about a million dollars a mile.” Personally I find that hard to believe, since if it were completely true, we’d have all of our water and sewer lines strung up on poles as well.

The magazine ends the article by suggesting that it might be a good project for an economic stimulus package, and I can see how KLP, being a relatively small locally owned business, could be eligible. Kennebunk is already a beautiful town, but can one imagine how great it would look without all those ugly poles and lines along our roads?

John White

Kennebunk