No, you’re not seeing double.
Alongside soaring concrete utility poles that can withstand winds of more than 145 miles per hour oftentimes stand their weaker, wooden predecessors.
While Florida Power & Light this year expects to complete the installation of 12,500 newfangled, storm-resistant poles in Broward and Palm Beach counties, plucking out the old is not happening as fast. Stringing cable and telephone wires onto FPL’s stronger perch is not as easy as flicking a switch.
It requires coordination between the utilities. And, yes, they’re working on it.
“We meet weekly with AT&T and Comcast to expedite and coordinate their transfers more efficiently,” said Bill Orlove, an FPL spokesman, who estimates his company has spent about half a billion dollars on making the electrical grid in FPL’s 35 counties more storm-resistant over the last three years. “Due to the coordination among multiple utilities, this sometimes can take longer than customers or we would like.”
The storms that ravaged the electrical grid in 2004-05 started FPL down this road, beginning with an evaluation of all electrical poles, and with the unsafe ones being removed immediately. But the piecemeal process of removing more steadfast older duplicates sometimes frustrates residents and city officials.
Doug Matthes, a retired support manager for the Broward County computer center, said it took between three and four years for the second set of poles to disappear from around his home in the Old Pompano neighborhood after the new ones went in. He campaigned against them with a spreadsheet. There are still some around, though, he said.
“It ruins the neighborhood,” he said, recalling how it looked when he had poles on all four sides of his house. “It’s an aesthetic issue.”
Hollywood city officials say they have tried to resolve duplicate pole issues with FPL after 1,300 new utility poles went up throughout the city since 2010. Recently, permits have just been pulled to install 100 new utility poles in Boca Raton and officials there expect the duplicates will stay for a while.
A survey of Pompano Beach’s excess utility poles earlier this year found 391 extras, which was by no means exhaustive, city leaders say. The desire to move things along prompted the formation of a task force earlier this year. As of September, the list of 391 extra wooden poles had been whittled to 112.
Pompano Beach Mayor Lamar Fisher said that, based on that inventory, he figures “thousands and thousands” of them remain throughout South Florida.
“It’s visual blight,” Fisher said.
Cities don’t keep counts of how many poles no longer carry electric currents — they don’t own them. FPL estimates just 4 percent of the extras belong to them — about 512 poles in Broward and Palm Beach counties. Talk to Comcast and AT&T and the number gets fuzzier.
A Comcast representative estimated 20 duplicate poles remain in Pompano Beach. For the larger area, though, she could not say. AT&T called the number “proprietary.”
Nevertheless, FPL spokesman Orlove says the old poles pose no risk — all that remain must meet a safety standard.
Juan Caycedo, a Boca Raton architect, thinks the duplicates are a menace to the landscape —visual contamination that should be underground. He also serves on Boca Raton’s Community Appearance Board.
“When I travel around the world, (it’s apparent) that this is one of the worst places for proliferation of exposed utilities,” he said. “We should try to bury them, but FPL doesn’t seem too interested in that.”
Orlove, however, says Florida’s rate of underground utilities is higher than the national one.
ageggis@sun-sentinel.com, 561-243-6624 or Twitter @AnneBoca
