Is there any reason why Europe can do buried cables just fine (and has been for a good few decades), but the US can't? As I understand even new neighbourhoods in the US often have overhead cables.

I live in Europe, and in general we don't distrust the state, and we don't want to pay less taxes (we would like more efficiency managing them, though).

Interesting, somehow I never thought of that. Lowering taxes is just not a major talking point in European politics except maybe for certain types of taxes, or distributing them differently, but there are no big divides on this.

The situation is highly regional. Walter's experience is specific to Seattle, but he's right that each region has its own infrastructure problems. Denver metro area (my neck of the woods) has mostly buried power, but a long-term fresh water problem.

Buried infrastructure also tends to be down for longer. Above ground lines go down more often. But they're easier to fix when they do; fixing buried lines can be a nightmare.

As an example, a mall near me was without power for weeks after flooding destroyed some underground electric infrastructure. The flooding didn't even do any real harm to the mall! They just got unlucky: underground lines and other equipment that should be waterproof weren't, and they shorted out in such a way that a bunch of stuff had to be dug up and replaced.

In 2019, some contractor got lucky while doing drilling works and scored a hit on both the main cable and the backup cable connecting the neighborhood of Berlin-Köpenick to the grid - severing each of the three phases in both cables. Establishing the construction site, digging the hole and fixing the two 110KV cables took a mere 31 hours - and that includes 6 hours of setting time for the couplings used. This was pretty much the worst case scenario that could have happened. It's possible to maintain good uptime with buried infrastructure, as with most things it's a matter of spending the money to do so.

Also anecdotal here but I can't remember the last time power was down for a long time where I live in Belgium.

If I hear about issues it's generally extremely local or an issue with power generation (we're predicted to have more issues in the future due to our gov being idiots void of long term thinking when it came to replacing old nuclear plants)

So all in all I haven't experienced this being down longer issue (and yes flooding shouldn't be able to destroy underground lines and such.)