Why Can't We Enjoy the View?

This article was first published in the August 2001 edition of Reader's Digest

Britain missed a great opportunity at the dawn of this millennium. Rather than a big dome of mixed beauties and fortunes, my own preferred project would have been to bury every electrical and telephone wire underground.

As an American who came here more than 30 years ago, intending to stay no more than four years, I found the sheer beauty of the place stunning. Coming from Kansas, where huge, featureless plains provide all the topographical excitement of a billiard table, I fell in love with Britain's cosy, irregular patchwork of hedges, fields, ponds and woods.

But a business trip to Yorkshire for MORI, my opinion-poll company, involved a drive over the Pennines. Every time we climbed yet another hill, prepared for a panorama of wild, desolate beauty, there was a marching army of electricity pylons. Vast, intrusive, ugly, they were ruining some of the finest upland scenery in Europe. And that was before I'd seen the four ranks of three-tiered pylons advancing across the countryside from power stations at Dungeness in Kent and Sizewell in Suffolk.

These reflections became a lot more personal in the mid-1970s when I bought a fifteenth century house right in the heart of Kent's orchard country. It was every American's dream of an English country cottage. Half-timbered, with a roof of Kent peg tiles, it was surrounded by lawns, a rose garden, yew trees, elm, oak -- and every type of overhead wire known to man.

Luckily, by then I had accumulated the necessary 16310,000 that, together with months of negotiation, eventually galvanized the local power and telephone companies into putting all these wires underground.

Yes, these things can be done. Indeed, under the Electricity Act, householders have a right to apply to their local power boards to have low-voltage wires removed from above their property. The catch, of course, is that they have to meet the cost of providing an alternative supply to their home.

In practice, the burial of wires remains one of the power companies' least publicized, most under funded, and reluctantly delivered functions. One man, keen to see the back of pylons wrecking the view from his house near Southwold in Suffolk, discovered that the group owning Eastern Electricity, in spite of making some 163149 million on its distribution network, had spent less than 163450,000 on such schemes over the previous five years. This situation is unlikely to change until there is a well-defined scheme -- and the political will -- to end this type of environmental pollution.

Even more disturbing is the possibility of carcinogenic effects created by overhead wires. In March, Sir Richard Doll, chair of the Advisory Group on Non-Ionizing Radiation and the man who discovered the link between smoking and lung cancer in the late 1940s, voiced this concern to government watchdog the National Radiological Protection Board. Prolonged and intense exposure to magnetic fields, such as those found near high-voltage power lines, he claimed, may slightly increase the risk of leukaemia in children.

Although the reasons for this potential association are still uncertain, a fellow scientist on the group, Professor Colin Blakemore, recognizes that, "it's important to acknowledge there may be a link and that we need to do more research on it".

Physicist Professor Denis Henshaw of Bristol University has been investigating the health effects of power lines since 1994. He believes there may be an increased risk of mouth, skin and lung cancers in those living close to high-voltage cables, arguing that power lines produce "corona ions" -- molecules in the air with an electrical charge. These attach themselves to airborne pollutants, such as car-exhaust fumes, possibly giving them a greater chance of sticking to the lungs or being absorbed by the body when inhaled.

But putting power lines underground should help fight Professor Henshaw's projected problems. The cables would then be well insulated electrically -- and the magnetic fields might be weakened too.

While the research to prove Henshaw's theory is still far off, it adds to the problems of those with homes under major power lines. Building societies may restrict how much they will lend, or even refuse to give a mortgage on such properties, conscious of the difficulties of reselling houses blighted by a potential health hazard, as well as an eyesore.

Obviously, the burial of all wires would not be cheap. The initial cost of putting low-voltage power lines underground is two to three times greater than stringing them overhead. With high-voltage cables, the need to use coolant, plus special insulation and cable-laying techniques, can raise this to 25 times as much. It can also be harder to pinpoint and mend faults underground.

However, once lines are buried they are no longer vulnerable to wind damage -- the great storms of 1987 and 1990 brought chaos to the electricity network -- so failure rates for low-voltage underground cables are only a third of those of overhead cables. In addition, pylons and poles don't have to be maintained and there is no need to trim nearby trees.

Modern technology is also making cable burial more viable. "Directional drilling" -- in which the drilling head can change direction underground, remote-controlled by engineers on the surface -- can cut costs by a quarter. Fault-finding underground has also been improved by a technique of sending a test electrical pulse down a cable and measuring its reflected signal, rather like submarine sonar.

Even so, putting all our wires underground will cost billions. But this money would not have to be spent in one go. The project could start with areas of outstanding natural beauty, sites of special scientific interest and listed buildings, rolling out as money becomes available.

This would also provide a golden opportunity for local initiatives: companies and householders could contribute funds to speed up the process. If the good people of Dorking didn't want to wait for their allocated turn in 2020 they could put up, say, half the money themselves and have their wires buried in 2008.

Losing overhead lines would also benefit tourism, one of the few growth areas in the developed world. For a visitor from most other parts of the globe, it would seem almost impossible to travel for more than a few minutes in this country without coming across another unspoilt village, church or castle. These are treasures that tourists would travel all day to see, let alone a few miles.

Putting the wires underground is a project for the very long term, maybe a century. But if we started it, we would be thanked until the next millennium for having taken the lead. And once the wires were underground, who would ever think of putting them overhead again?