We started (well, for me, started) the day yesterday with a 20 minute or so power failure, which appeared to affect at least our whole block. Gee, I guess so:
Squirrel Knocks Out Power in Midtown
ATLANTA — About 7,000 residents were left without power in Midtown Atlanta Thursday morning due to the workings of a tiny critter.
Georgia Power officials said a squirrel somehow got into a substation and knocked out the power in the area, including Colony Square. The power was restored after 20 minutes.
The squirrel was killed during his explorations, officials said.
By electricity, I’d assume…not by the ever-vigilant forces we’ve been told are protecting our valiant homeland’s infrastructure.
Somehow satisfying to be able to figure out—or in some cases, actually watch—“what happened” online, even when the what happened is, as often the case in the big city, violent and unnerving.
I came out one morning to find two news helicopters hovering directly overhead our house…a few days later, some modest Googling brought up this police action (video with siren sounds, btw) around the corner at the same time and date, caught, as they like to say these days, on tape, and then pushed out to the world on YouTube. As far as I could tell from the Atlanta police reports, there was no one actually shot—just the aftermath of a police chase, despite how the video’s labeled.
Case(s) closed?
April 4th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Squirrels are so often the culprit in power outages that reporters and editors have run out of cute ways to say so. (I’m partial to “frying squirrel,” m’self.) Did you know one is suspected in the chain-reaction power failure that blacked out much of the northeastern U.S. in August 2003? Yea, it is true.
July 11th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
We just replaced our electric meter and all of the wiring running to it, after having the power knocked out and two outlets smoked. The cause: squirrels have been using our power lines as a sort of superhighway between the alley and our roof. Naturally we were not up to code, and this involved multiple expensive professionals sticking 13 foot poles through our roof and mumbling things like “…and we might have to move the breaker box into the middle of the bedroom wall…” Naturally, the squirrels have refused to pay the bill.