Oct. 25--The 2010 Farmers Almanac says we're in for a cold, wet winter in this part of the country.

Last week I found a woolly worm crawling up my storm door. His woolliness seemed woollier than worms of most falls, although I'll admit I am not expert in this field.

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service says it looks like a moderate-sized El Nino is building up in the Pacific. That will likely mean it will be about as cold as usual and about as wet as usual in northeastern Oklahoma, the weather service says.

So depending on what insect or meteorologist you listen to, it's going to be very bad around here for the next few months, or about as bad as usual.

As for me, I think I'm going to lay in a supply of canned foods and flashlight batteries because, despite the lessons of the disastrous ice storm of 2007, AEP-PSO has been able to accomplish practically nothing this year in terms of taking overhead electrical lines in Tulsa neighborhoods and burying them.

If we have another ice storm, you can count on another blackout.

Further, the company has no plans at the moment to do anything about burying more electrical lines in the near future.

A chilling wind Thanks in part to grass-roots lobbying efforts by Tulsans, the state bureaucracy summoned up the fortitude to push the company to double its line burial efforts, but nothing happened after a chilling wind blew in from the northeast in the form of an economic panic.

The last time American Electrical Power-Public

Service Company of Oklahoma asked for a rate increase, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission included in the package a doubling of the funding the company was authorized to spend on converting overhead electrical wires to buried wires.

The authorization went from about $20 million a year to about $40 million a year, said David Sartin, director of business operations support for AEP-PSO.

But about a year ago, when the recession hit, the financial markets in New York froze solid. AEP-PSO was concerned it wouldn't be able to sell bonds to fund capital projects, including underground conversion, and it suspended all future operations.

Since that time interest rates on the bond market have pretty much returned to the pre-crisis level, but the elements that go into determining the company's bond rating, which determines how much interest AEP-PSO will pay and whether any investors will be willing to buy the debt in the first place, haven't improve enough, Sartin said.

The company has no plans to take a bond package that would fund underground work -- and many other capital projects -- to the market, Sartin said.