One point for above ground is that it is far easier to know when it’s damaged to the point of being unsafe for the general public and much simpler and quicker to repair. For underground, you don’t know that until there is a failure that causes outages or someone/something gets hurt.
While I have seen numerous downed power lines, I have not know anything actual hurt by them. On the other hand, I have known multiple dogs who’ve died stepping on top of electrified access points while out for walks. While this is purely anecdotal, it’s not black and white either.
Other underground utilities have more obvious failure signs to the public (smells, flooding, water damage etc) and generally have minimal short term consequences while electrical faults tend to go unnoticed until a significant failure event (i.e. power goes out or something gets killed). Our town has hundreds of reported natural gas leaks, that is take years to fix while pole repairs tend to happen within an hour of being reported with police standing by until the crew shows up.
Yeah, my story is purely anecdotal, plenty of people have died from downed lines, especially instantaneous failures in high weather events. just not in my limited experience. Just want to give some counterpoints as the failure cases can be silent and deadly to the general public, unlike most other underground utilities.