San Diego

City, SDG&E Ramp Up Efforts to Move Power, Phone Lines Underground

This week the city approved six more undergrounding projects moving through the process for $8.2 million

Alongside the city of San Diego, San Diego Gas and Electric says it’s speeding up the process of moving the community’s utility lines underground.

For nearly 50 years, the city has worked to transfer its power and telephone lines suspended on high poles below concrete.

The city says putting utility lines underground is safer, more reliable, and helps the scenery.

And although there are still 1,000 miles of road left to work on, according to a city spokesperson, SDG&E and the local government say they’re on it. The San Diego City Council greenlighted more projects just this week.

“We’re accelerating this work throughout the city. We’ve got over 40 miles of projects active right now in the city of San Diego, and actually in the next couple of years, in total, we hope to have nearly 100 miles underground,” explained Wes Jones, SDG&E communications manager.

“In this last year, we’ve done about 23 miles,” he added.

And crews are still working.

In the Bay Park area, crews have been digging and jack hammering and trenching and laying down new line infrastructure for months.

“Hopefully they’ll be done soon!” said Sara Duke, a Bay Park resident.

While those crews told NBC 7 they still have about 25 percent left to complete in that neighborhood, Duke said it hasn’t been that bad.

“It’s inconvenient, but…it’s not been too bad, it hasn’t been as bad as I thought,” she said.

“I think it will be nice not to have telephone poles in the sky,” Duke noted.

This week the city approved six more undergrounding projects moving through the process for $8.2 million. The areas targeted includes San Ysidro, the College Area, Encanto and Clairemont Mesa.

“We’ll do door hangers, we do door-to-door conversations with residents if we’re going to be in front of their households,” said Jones. “This builds a better relationship with the neighbors and that’s really an important part of the work.”

You can look up upcoming projects and monitor the progress of ongoing projects here.

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