Amid four days of high winds, frigid temperatures, and freezing rain last month, the Little Store in Cedar Mill lost power to its cold cases packed with food. “Once we knew the power wasn’t coming back, we took everything out and lined the patio with coolers and dry ice,” says manager Sarah Hopkins, whose parents opened the Little Store in 2018.

That impromptu refrigeration saved some inventory, but the store lost roughly $4,500 in perishables—$800 from a display case of 3-gallon tubs of Tillamook ice cream—not to mention the lack of business when the power remained off for days. Nearly every winter for the last six years, the Little Store has been left in the dark, this year along with over 150,000 Portlanders, many of whom missed up to a week of work or school. The question is why? Cities in harsher climates avoid widespread, long-lasting outages.

The best case study might be Fort Collins, Colorado, home of one of the most dependable electrical grids in the US. Tucked into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the city gets plenty of wind and snow, but more than 99 percent of the electrical system is underground: wires are threaded through conduits that are placed in trenches approximately four to six feet deep.

“We had a bomb cyclone go through a few years ago, where it was blizzard conditions for three or four days, 50- to 60-mile-an-hour winds, and we only had one customer go out of power,” says Travis Walker, electrical distribution director for Fort Collins. “It was because a fence blew down and knocked a meter off the wall.” The average customer has a 22-minute outage every three years, he adds.

Undergrounding is not a panacea: Trees, for example, can still disrupt power when uprooted, by severing buried lines once their anchoring gives way. But submerging wires brings grid stability during winter storms and wind-whipped forest fires, such as those that swept across Oregon during Labor Day weekend in 2020, and eliminates a number of potential disruptions, from fallen branches to wildlife.

According to Portland General Electric, more than half of its distribution system is already subterranean. Portland City Code prohibits above-ground wires, poles, and appliances in densely populated areas like downtown, the Pearl District, and the South Waterfront; that way electrical equipment doesn’t vie for square footage alongside bus shelters, fire hydrants, benches, and other amenities, says Dylan Rivera, spokesperson for the Portland Bureau of Transportation.

Portland also has six underground wiring districts situated primarily along the Interstate 405 loop, though there is a small segment in the inner eastside. However, there are no plans to designate new districts, and it all seems to come down to the price tag. “To convert utility lines from overhead to underground is very expensive,” says Travis Hultin, public works director and chief engineer for the City of Troutdale, who points to not just the cost of tucking power lines underground, but excavating and then restoring existing surface-level features, and navigating the maze of below-ground elements, like sewer and gas lines. Troutdale collects a 1.5 percent privilege tax on Portland General Electric gross revenue from customers. That money is then directed to a fund dedicated to placing lines below ground, and the ensuing projects typically cost millions. “It’s like anything else in construction. Are you, for instance, going to have to tear up a bunch of sidewalk and put it back? That costs a lot.”

It also cost a lot to lose power for two days last month, as happened at Yaowarat, Portland Monthly’s 2024 Restaurant of the Year, which led to the spoilage of everything in the restaurant’s walk-in cooler—from eggs to milk to tofu, and $5,000 worth of meat. That, plus lost sales, forced restaurateur Akkapong Earl Ninsom to dig into his personal savings to make payroll—a $25,000 hit to his account. “We had to start from zero again, which is kind of a real pain,” says Ninsom, who is also owner of several other restaurants, including Eem and Langbaan. “For us, our goal right now is to prevent rather than fix, because there’s a lot of factors we couldn’t control.”

Walker estimates that burying a standard line today would cost approximately $150,000 a mile. That figure jumps closer to a million for larger feeder cables that carry electricity from substations, which would spell rate hikes for customers—a cost that he says some would consider worthwhile, especially with so many people working from home these days: “The reliability pays itself off.”