Fire victims may be asked to pay to bury Malibu communications lines Play

It may be up to the 300 homeowners who lost their oceanfront houses to the Palisades Fire to pay to put the big thick overhead communications towers — which were reinstalled after the fire — underground.

The city council Monday night approved asking the governor to order Caltrans to revisit the issue.

The big high-voltage lines have now been put underground by Southern California Edison. But household voltage wires remain on poles, as do five thick communications cables owned by various communications companies. Those will not go underground as it stands now.

Council member Haylynn Conrad says she is upset that the recent SCE undergrounding project was only half the job.

"We are constantly thinking about how we are going to underground all of the poles — not just some of the poles, but all of the poles because none of us want the poles. There's not a lot of funding. There's not a lot of leverage to force the CPUC to force Frontier to go underground."

The heavy, thick communications cables are owned by companies like Verizon and Charter and Crown Castle. Those are not going anywhere.

Steve Uhring told his fellow city council members that maybe the beachfront fire victims should pick up the costs.

"The telecoms have been historically crying poor mouth in terms of getting this done. And we had the idea last week that maybe residents should work with a little assessment district — assess the houses and use that to underground lines."

But who is going to pay to put the wires feeding the streetlights along PCH underground? City council member Doug Stewart points out that these are also an issue.

"As you drive down PCH, you've got telecom wires primarily on the beach side. But there's streetlights on every one of those poles. So if we're going to try to address the poles being up, we have to address what we're gonna do with the streetlights. And that's a safety issue about having the streetlights up — that's the reason for having them in the first place. So we're gonna have to talk about replacing those poles, whether it's telecom or not, with something that's not going to fall down in a fire."

The tops of the power poles, with the high-voltage lines, have now been chopped off. The local service wires for the streetlights remain, along with the thick black communications lines.

Similar partial undergrounding projects are now underway on Latigo Canyon Road, and will be coming soon to the troublesome Cuthbert Circuit in the Paradise Cove and Point Dume areas.