ISABEL POWER OUTAGES CONTINUE, and this useful chart shows where and how many. (It omits the crucial information that one of them is David Bernstein, though.)

I realize that underground power lines are more expensive to install, maintain, etc. But I wonder whether they’re really more expensive in a global sense if you factor in the costs imposed on consumers by the more-frequent power outages associated with overhead lines. (Not to mention the aesthetic costs of overhead lines, which are high.) This would be an interesting and useful topic for news coverage, though once their Mother of Storms hype ends they seem largely uninterested in this sort of thing. Here’s a roundup of hurricane-recovery efforts, and here’s a good article from the Post on electrical systems, resilience, and recovery that mentions underground lines — but that also says that community restrictions on tree-trimming are a big source of problems.

I had some related thoughts in this column a few weeks ago. The big problem is that people want reliability, but don’t want to pay for it. But when you don’t pay for reliability, you wind up paying for un reliability, and I’m not sure that’s cheaper in the end.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting article from the Post on how wi-fi, high-speed Internet, and other technologies mitigated the economic effect of the hurricane. (Via Bill Hobbs).