SAVANNAH, Ga. - Victorian homes, marble monuments and cobblestone streets aren't the only features of downtown Savannah that are historic - so is the electrical grid of 50 to 80-year-old cables that likely sparked underground fires and explosions twice in the past five months.
A blast last week blew off manhole covers, spewed flames and smoke up from the street and blacked out homes, restaurants and stores for hours. A similar explosion two blocks away rattled downtown office buildings Aug. 15.
No one was injured in either blast. Still, Savannah officials say the explosions raise serious worries about an outdated underground network being pushed to its limits by commercial growth in a city that thrives on tourism.
"It's a major concern," Mayor Otis Johnson said Tuesday. "It poses a public safety risk to our citizens."
Georgia Power is still working to determine the exact cause of the latest fire and explosion. Crews finished making repairs over the weekend.
Company spokesman Jeff Wilson said the aging web of 80 miles of cable crisscrossing the 2.5-square-mile downtown historic district appears largely to blame.
Wilson said the August explosion resulted after a 50-year-old underground cable overheated, burned through its insulation and caught fire.
The flames engulfed surrounding cables beneath the street, Wilson said, and the burning insulation gave off a combustible gas that ignited with enough force to toss three manhole covers into the air.
"We still can't say for sure that the same thing happened in both instances," Wilson said. "But age is a similar characteristic in each of these."
Georgia Power is two years into working on a $51 million upgrade of the underground network that will increase its capacity from 4,000 to 13,000 volts.
The upgrade was scheduled to take a decade to complete. Georgia Power said Tuesday it will bring in extra crews starting this month to speed up the work and finish the job twice as fast - by 2012.
Michael Brown, Savannah's city manager, said his office is pushing Georgia Power to check the entire underground system for possible trouble spots so those areas can be upgraded first.
"The question in the interim is where are they going to have overheats and failures that are catastrophic," Brown said. "They have agreed to do all possible research and use all possible technology to identify potential problem spots. That's very difficult in an old system that doesn't have lots of computer monitoring and it's all underground."
Savannah's $2 billion tourist economy, centered in the downtown historic district, has strained its aging electrical grid. Hotel construction alone has placed an added burden on the power grid, with 2,608 new hotel rooms added in the Savannah area since 2002 - many of them downtown.
Wilson said the cable that caught fire in August "had been under a lot of stress, had seen an increasing load over the years."
At the Planters Inn, two blocks from the explosion last week, general manager Marc Friday said he had to make reservations at other hotels for nearly 40 guests after his inn lost power for several hours. Friday estimates it cost him about $7,000 in revenue.
He worries another fire will break out before the network can be fully upgraded.
"I don't think anybody can tell us without a doubt, 'Don't worry, everything's fine,'" Friday said. "It seems like we've been doing a lot of building and not paying enough attention to the infrastructure in the city."
Though rare, similar cable fires have happened in other cities. Last March, a Los Angeles firefighter was killed in an explosion while trying to extinguish a 60-year-old underground cable that was burning. A cable failure May 2 sent flames shooting from manholes on Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass.
Wilson said Georgia Power is researching possible safety measures to prevent further explosions in Savannah's older cables until they're upgraded. The mayor said he's not willing to wait years for a solution.
"It's got to be something shorter than that," Johnson said. "And I think they realize that and will be working to compress their schedule as much as possible."
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Another example of Georgia Power taking money that they say is going for infastructure upgrades and fattening their pockets and not doing what they are supposed to be using it for.