State and Hawaiian Electric Co. officials are planning to bury miles of utility lines and remove poles that have crashed into homes and cars and disrupted life along the Wai'anae Coast.

"It's critical," said state Rep. Maile Shimabukuro, D-45th (Wai'anae, Makaha, Makua). "All my life living here, the poles have come falling down. It really is amazing that no one has died yet."

An agreement, which was scheduled to be announced today, among HECO, the Lingle administration and the heads of the state House and Senate calls for old wooden utility poles along the Wai'anae Coast to be reinforced and eventually replaced by metal ones by Oct. 1.

The goal is to eventually remove many of the poles and bury power, television, telephone and other overhead lines sometime in the future, although no date is outlined in the agreement.

On Dec. 5, at least 16 utility poles along Farrington Highway snapped or were bowled over by wind gusts up to 70 mph, knocking out power to hundreds of HECO customers for days and choking traffic on the Leeward Coast.

Some of the damaged poles had been replaced just more than a year before, when strong winds in March 2006 toppled more than a dozen poles.

The agreement leaves many critical questions unanswered.

Which parts of the Wai'anae Coast will get their overhead lines buried, how much the work will cost and who will pay for it all will depend on input from community meetings that will begin within 90 days, according to people familiar with the plan. They asked not to be identified because state and HECO officials have scheduled a news conference at 10:30 a.m. today at HECO's headquarters on Richards Street to announce the agreement.

The agreement encourages companies such as Hawaiian Telcom and Oceanic Time Warner Cable to participate in the discussions and share in the costs, but they did not sign the agreement.

Shimabukuro expects the cost of the work to be high but also long overdue.

She drove to a Neighborhood Board meeting at Wai'anae satellite city hall the night of the December storm and said it "was pure chaos."

In the aftermath of the fallen utility poles, Shimabukuro said, "the roads were completely shut down and people were without power. The whole thing is very upsetting. It's just completely unacceptable."

Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com.