
Power outages caused by squirrels - tod222
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/opinion/sunday/squirrel-power.html
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harrytuttle
Squirrels stole a chunk of fiber we had between two buildings years ago. They
used it to make nests with. We even had a video of them hanging upside down
going along the supporting cable. Cost us 3 days of downtime though (this was
internal office network).

mitigation was simply rubbing vaseline (petroleum jelly) all over it once a
quarter so they just fell off.

Wildlife is incredibly destructive :)

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>Wildlife is incredibly destructive :)

Said the guy whose office occupies the space where the trees that grandma and
grandpa squirrel used to live in once stood.

~~~
harrytuttle
Well hardly. The building was built on an old air strip and we had the trees
planted!

I agree with your sentiment though entirely.

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VLM
Koprowski's explanation from the last page is probably the most correct part
of the article. Having done some time in the "greater telecom biz" I assure
you that squirrels do not solely eat copper power wires, they are ravenous for
aerial optical fiber and most any coaxial cable (CATV, communications/RF
stuff, etc)

I have not studied this at length but I'm told the carcass from turning a
squirrel into a power line fuse is substantially different than the carcass
from shorting out a couple KW of broadcast transmitter RF and a tech can tell
at a glance which cabling needs replacing when they see a smoking carcass on
the ground. But I never worked outside plant so this might just be a tall tale
they tell cubie dwellers.

Unlike what the article claims, I'm told there's off the shelf nearly perfect
repellants based on hot sauce and at least some cables like coax are often
flooded with a dielectric gel which is designed to taste awful, or so they
claim.

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patio11
_Matthew Olearczyk, a program manager with the Electric Power Research
Institute, explains that typically a squirrel will cause a blackout by
scampering across electrical equipment and touching simultaneously both an
energized component, like one of the cylindrical transformers at the top of a
utility pole, and a grounded piece of equipment. The squirrel completes the
circuit, generating an arc. There is an instantaneous flash of blue light. At
its center is the squirrel, combusting._

It's written in a very Dave Barry sensibility throughout.

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packetslave
We've had at least one datacenter power issue where the root cause was a cat.
9 lives tend to get used up quickly when 115kV is involved.

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bluedino
My significant other works at the local power company, I'm always receiving
SMS pictures of charred raccoons etc.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Isn't that romantic.

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rangibaby
2009: 'A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed
for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw
significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's
subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut... As a result, temperatures
in part of the LHC's circuit climbed to almost 8 Kelvin - significantly higher
than the normal operating temperature of 1.9, and close to the temperature at
which the LHC's niobium-titanium magnets are likely to "quench", or cease
superconducting and become ordinary "warm" magnets.'

[1]
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/lhc_bread_bomb_dump_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/lhc_bread_bomb_dump_incident/)

~~~
Wingman4l7
1945: A Japanese fire balloon[1] was responsible for causing "a short circuit
in the power lines supplying electricity for the nuclear reactor cooling
pumps" at the Hanford Site of the Manhattan Project -- but "backup safety
devices restored power almost immediately".

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon)

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jloughry
Peter Neumann has collected extensive archives on squirrelcides resulting in
power failures. Search the RISKS archive at
[http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/RISKS](http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/RISKS) for lots of
reports.

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antsam
I've had a squirrel segment my Christmas lights into easy to carry pieces
twice now :(

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alecthomas
I used to work at a large telco in Australia, and one of the most infamous
support tickets in the system had the summary "Bird attack at the Hellfire
club".

The Hellfire club is a BDSM club in Melbourne, and apparently a bird had
attacked the cabling leading into the building, bringing down the phone
systems.

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tokipin
squirrels are badass. they use the power lines as highways and they even have
off-ramps (tree branches). and then there's this squirrel i see sometimes that
has dark fur and it isn't afraid of humans and goes right out in the open
eating all the nuts that the other human-fearing squirrels would never get
close to and one time it gave me this look

~~~
gadders
Probably a Crack Squirrel -
[http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/oct/08/drugsandalcohol.pa...](http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/oct/08/drugsandalcohol.patrickbarkham)

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jsz0
They cause quite a few Internet outages too. We have a lot of change
management tickets filed under 'squirrel damage' so at some point I started
using it for some of my change management requests. BGP blip? God damn
squirrels.

