Football games are bad for telephone poles

I’m doing a story about utility poles (which I, like you, still call “telephone poles” even though the electric company owns at least half of them) – and here’s the most entertaining quote I’ve heard so far: “After the first Patriots pre-season game, we had four broken poles that night.”

Eversource (formerly PSNH) owns 446,675 poles in its New Hampshire coverage area (about 4 for every 5 customers), not including the towers that carry high-voltage transmission lines. Sounds like one of their biggest enemies are cars, or shuold I say drivers.