Buried, and good riddance

I think I've mentioned that the wires that bring electricity up from the river valley to our hamlet are going to be buried. Enterrés. We don't know exactly when the work will be done, but we've signed a set of papers giving our authorization, and a surveyor has been out here several times doing whatever it is that surveyors do.

There are five utility poles in this picture, all around our house.
At least four of them are not long for this world.

We'll benefit from the "undergrounding" in at least two ways. First of all, we should have fewer power outages. Three years ago we went without electricity for four or five days because a tall spindly tree fell on and pulled down the wires, which run up through some woods. A storm had caused power outages all around the region at the time and repairing our wires was given low priority because only nine houses were affected.

This concrete pole on the northwest corner of our property will be taken out.

Then two years ago lightning struck the transformer on the utility pole out behind our house. That time, the electricity was off for only about 36 hours, because it was an isolated incident and the repair crew got here pretty fast.

The pole by the pond, on the right side of the road, will be no more. Bon débarras, as we say.

We'll also benefit from having the wires put underground instead of on poles because at least four ugly utility poles near our house will be removed. You can see some of them in the pictures here.