Haven, Southern California Edison Archive, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California “Stringing wires on the 243-mile long Big Creek to Los Angeles 150,00-volt transmission line,” 1913, Bishop G. The first power lines in the United States to use all lattice steel towers. Instead of hands robed with lighting, the unpredictable arcing of energized lines swaying in the wind and warmed by climate change has unwittingly ignited dry vegetation and sent waves of fire across mountains and valleys to the doors of Los Angeles.īig Creek, 1913. Long, energized wires are potential tinder boxes. In recent years, another negative inflection has been laced onto the lines. Wires, poles, and lattice steel towers made aesthetic intrusions on otherwise beautiful California landscapes. 1 and sent hydroelectric power at an unprecedented potential of 150,000 volts across 241-miles to the Eagle Rock substation, the Los Angeles Times envisioned “a hand robed with lightning” stretched “across the gulf of valleys and mountains to the doors of this city.” Contemporaries may have viewed the new, soaring steel transmission towers that began in the Sierras, crossed the Tejon Pass, the Newhall Pass, and then descended into the valley as hands, “robed with lightning,” but by the second half of the twentieth century, most Angelinos associated overhead power lines with industrial blight. In 1913, when Southern California Edison opened the Big Creek Power House No. ![]() They have simultaneously proliferated electric currents across California and faded in popularity for over a century. Historically, California’s overhead electric lines have been pushed to the margins of the built environment and, when possible, physically buried out of sight now, the webs over our heads are central artifacts in the broader struggle to avoid climate catastrophe and enact climate justice.
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