Infrastructure: overlooked risks in overhead power lines and telecoms 

• Overland lines are everywhere and easily ignored, but their failure can cut power, halt connectivity and trigger liability claims that run into the billions. The business interruption outweighs the value of the asset and businesses hit hardest are rarely the ones that own the infrastructure that failed them.
• Aging is the central exposure. Poles and lines built decades ago are still in service, and the decay that matters most – below the groundline, or inside the fittings – is usually invisible until the moment of failure.
• Severe weather, wildfire and deliberate sabotage are converging threats – and because these networks are dispersed and the data on them scattered across systems and owners, the risk is hard to see, locate and manage.
• Although businesses cannot maintain an asset they do not own, they should map how much they depend on it, decide what redundancy is worth its cost, and align the right internal teams before a line goes down rather than after. 

In November 2021, a timber power pole in Australia split along the very holes that had been drilled to test it. The pole had been rated for another 50 years of service. The routine check intended to confirm its strength appears to have weakened it instead.

In February 2024, a decayed utility pole in the Texas Panhandle broke, dropping its power lines on to dry grass. The result was the Smokehouse Creek Fire, the largest wildfire in state history, burning more than a million acres and causing over a billion dollars in damage. 

In South Africa, theft and vandalism targeting electricity pylons, transformers and substations cost the national utility more than 221 million rand ($12mn) in the 11 months to February 2025.

Three continents, three different ways to fail: a pole undermined by the test meant to prove it sound; a pole rotting; a network stripped for its metal. What they share is not a cause but a blind spot. Infrastructure does not have to be buried to be overlooked; sometimes it is overlooked precisely because it has always been there, in plain sight.

Oliver Lauxmann, Global Practice Group Leader, Chief Underwriting Office – Liability, at Allianz Commercial, has a name for this blind spot: silent exposure. “Poles are invisible until the moment they fail,” Lauxmann says. “But this is not niche exposure. These lines cross geographies, industries and ownership structures, so a single failure rarely stays local.”

The second failure mode is often manmade. Where overhead pole-sharing is common – notably in parts of Asia Pacific, the UK and the US – utilities lease space to telecoms and cable tenants. Each new attachment adds weight, and every bolt, bracket and lag screw breaches the preservative treatment and exposes untreated wood, so water pooling around a fitting lets decay take hold. 

How far this goes varies by region, but it is most extreme in parts of Latin America, where the largely unmonitored spread of cable providers has produced dense tangles of wiring (known locally as tallarines, or cobwebs), abandoned “ghost cables” no one removes.

The added weight leaves poles leaning and prone to collapse: Peru’s public-services ombudsman has flagged overloaded, tangled cabling and poles on the verge of falling in central Lima. A national clean-up has since stripped more than 200 tons of disused aerial cables from the country’s streets.

And the trend is toward more sharing: the EU’s Gigabit Infrastructure Act, applicable since 2025, now requires utilities to open their poles and towers to telecom operators.

But the heaviest loads a pole carries are not bolted on. They come from the weather – and the weather is changing. 

Pallarés is wary of reducing the problem to its most visible symptom: “Wildfire is the headline risk, but extreme weather is not one thing – it is many things arriving at once. The same infrastructure has to cope with heavier snow loads in winter, higher temperatures in summer, and with winds increasingly concentrated into short, violent episodes.”

The common thread is mismatch: “Infrastructure designed for the climate of 30 years ago is now being asked to perform in conditions it was never built for,” Pallarés says. 

Overland lines are built to last: poles, conductors and lines can remain in service for decades. That endurance is a virtue until it quietly becomes a liability – every year of deferral compounding the question of how old is too old, how often to inspect, and when “still standing” stops meaning “still safe.”

The Texas case shows what happens when those questions go unanswered. The state later sued the utility, alleging negligent maintenance of its infrastructure, including nearly century-old poles. The 2023 Maui wildfires in Hawaii raised similar scrutiny of aging overhead power infrastructure. 

“Aging infrastructure is a central part of the discussion,” says Lauxmann. “Utility companies need to ask whether assets are still fit for purpose, how they are maintained, and whether investment levels are sufficient to prevent avoidable failures.”

“Awareness is the first step,” says Ricken. “Clients need to understand where their exposures are, who owns or maintains the assets, and what alternatives exist if something goes wrong.

“For companies that depend on infrastructure such as power or telecommunications, the key question is simple: if the system fails, what is the backup plan?”

Decay is indifferent, and weather is impersonal. The third way a line fails has intent behind it – and intent changes the risk, because an adversary picks the moment, the place, and the point of maximum damage.

Two motives dominate. The first is money: copper and steel are worth stealing – the kind of theft that has cost South Africa’s grid operator hundreds of millions of rand a year and takes the network down as collateral. The second is disruption, where the line is not loot but the target itself.

In March 2024, arsonists set fire to a high-voltage pylon near Grünheide, outside Berlin. The damage cut power to surrounding villages and brought Tesla’s Gigafactory to a standstill for more than a week; a left-wing extremist group claimed responsibility, declaring the aim of the “biggest possible blackout.”

For Lauxmann, the pattern matters as much as the individual incident. “Such sabotage examples show how attacks on grids or power stations can have implications for the wider network of lines and connected infrastructure.”

So, what can a business do? For companies that own and operate this infrastructure, preparation starts with knowing what they have. The asset register has no single address. That information is often scattered across departments, systems and, where ownership has changed hands, separate companies.

“The information we need to understand the risk is straightforward: where exactly is the asset, how old is it, what material it is, and when was it last inspected?” says Pallarés. “Often that data exists somewhere but is spread across different systems, different departments, sometimes different companies if the ownership has changed. You cannot manage a risk you cannot locate.”

For the companies that use and rely on the network, the risk management options might be more limited, but they do not include doing nothing. Although businesses cannot maintain an asset they do not own, they should map how much they depend on it, decide what redundancy is worth its cost, and align the right internal teams before a line goes down rather than after. 

“When insurers ask for detailed information, there is a reason,” says Ricken. “Data on location, ownership, condition, maintenance and exposure is essential to understanding the risk.”