ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — When Isaac threatened much of the northern Gulf Coast in August, Pleasure Island was spared the worst of it.

Besides a rough surf charging to the dune lines and TV reporters braving windy conditions at the beach, it was a hindrance at most.

But it provided a prime example of why Orange Beach is working with Baldwin Electrical Membership Cooperative to get as many of the city’s electrical connections underground as possible.

“In Isaac, minimal storm, very little damage, but we had power outages for five, six, seven days,” City Administrator Ken Grimes said. “All of Orange Beach was blinking on and off because of salt buildup on existing lines tied to those substations. We had to get fire crews to go spray the lines off.”

Had those lines been underground, this problem wouldn’t have occurred as frequently, Grimes said.

“Every morning it was consistent between 7 and 8, people were getting ready for school and work,” he said. “It was the salt buildup from the tropical storm. That’s an example of we’ll have less problems on the beach when all that’s underground.”

The City Council recently gave the OK for the next two large projects by EMC to put replacement lines underground. The first will be from the Ono Island bridge to the state line and the second will be on Wilson Boulevard in East Orange Beach.

The city requires that whenever possible new lines in the city must be installed underground. When EMC wants to replace old lines, it absorbs the cost of the job if it were going back above ground.

“They’re going to cover the replacement of the lines anyway,” Grimes said. “We’re covering the difference to go underground.”

A surcharge of $5.25 on the monthly bill of every meter in the city pays for those extra costs associated with having the lines underground.

“One thing we need to remember here is that for every dollar any fulltime resident puts into a tax or surcharge, there’s seven dollars matched by people who don’t live here but own property here,” Mayor Tony Kennon said. “If there’s ever a such thing as a good tax, and I don’t know that there is, but this is as close to it as you can get. They get such a great return on their dollar.”

Currently, Grimes said, the city owes EMC about $900,000 for former underground utility work.

“That surcharge per meter accumulates for the city of Orange Beach today on a monthly basis that generates about $74,000 on average,” he said. “It’s grown some. That amount then knocks off chunks of existing debt.”

By the time the next two projects roll around, Grimes said that debt likely will be paid off.

Underground lines provide the advantage of a quicker recovery after storms.

“Our goal is we want go get the beach front completely underground so that we can have a quicker startup after any storm,” Kennon said. “But this also applies to undergrounding like we’re going to do on Wilson Boulevard and other places off the beach.

“We feel like that it is a great investment in getting it underground on the beach to allow us to get up and running after a storm which is tax revenue which comes back into the community for services as well as the aesthetics.”

Grimes pointed out the roadway east of the Alabama 182 and Alabama 161 intersection had light poles but no wires strung from pole to pole. West of the intersection is an entirely different scene with streams of wires lining both sides of the road.

“It just looks so much nicer,” Kennon said. “If you turn east, left, at 161 and go toward Ono, look how it looks compared to turning west where you have wires running everywhere.”

Grimes says the first of the projects beginning at the Ono bridge won’t interfere with this tourist season.

“The one from Ono, the state line project, the engineering started as soon as we gave them the go ahead,” he said. “I would think you’ve got several months of engineering, get through the summer months. My guess would be fall at the earliest. Just the engineering and permitting on ALDOT’s right of way, it’ll take that long to get them through the summer season which is great for us.”

Wilson Boulevard runs north off of Canal Road next to the Recreation Center and in front of Orange Beach Elementary. The whole neighborhood, Grimes said, will benefit.

“It’s going to put those power lines on Wilson and all of the arteries, that half of East Orange Beach is going to go underground,” he said.