At an apartment where I lived many years ago, I was doing the laundry one afternoon (each unit had its own washer and dryer) and the washing machine started slowing down and speeding back up and slowing down again, and finally stopped. I checked the lights and they were off too. So I called the office and reported the problem.
After power was restored later that day, the maintenance guy came by to see if things were OK, and he explained that a squirrel had chewed into the power line.
It did freak me out a bit that in the washing machine's behavior I was indirectly seeing the death throes of the squirrel.
I did some work at a utility company a few years back where I had access to a database of every historical outage across the system along with such info as the diagnosed cause.
Thousands of outages were caused by “Wildlife (Squirrel)”—more than once it crossed my mind that this file was the last record of those squirrels’ lives on Earth!
Eh, they just love using the lines as runways, though normally it's the lower cable/Telcom lines. It's not terribly surprising the little bastards cause problems, especially where trees grow close.
We once heard a big bang in the morning as the power went out. Decided to go for a bike ride and saw the just-fried squirrel at the base of the pole right behind my house.
I've seen a squirrel get electrocuted by a power line with my own eyes. Bright blinding light, bzzzt sound, and later charred squirrel on the ground. Can't be that rare
Since no one has linked it yet, according to CyberSquirrel, most outages are caused by (or blamed on) squirrels, up to 2019: https://cybersquirrel1.com
We have a transformer up on a pole at one of our datacenters. Bird landed on it, fried itself and took everything offline. The side effect was that it fried a bunch of cmos batteries in the servers. We've since put a fake eagle up there.
As an actual EE who has designed mainboards, this smells of hyperbole to the N-th degree with a dose of misinformed. As another user said, you had a bunch of dead unmonitored CMOS cells, then lost power. Then realized that all your BIOS configuration parameters where lost and systems wouldn't boot from disk, likely because whatever chosen disk / raid controller configuration was wrong too then. We test mainboards to destruction with simulated faulty power supplies. The CMOS coin cell is so far down the failure chain, your mainboard has released the magic smoke several times over before the CMOS cell on the 3.3V rail with multiple protections is a single failure. I have exploded and burned CMOS coin cells before, but not before the board was a wreck. I'm talking catastrophic failure that it's a bigger concern to the system operators health, forget the board.
I've dealt with the fallout from 'disorganized' power failures in datacenters before. I don't know exactly what goes on, but I know that a notable but relatively small fraction of our servers had real deal hardware problems after, many not booting up at all. Many fried power supplies, many cooked batteries.
It is not possible for a CMOS battery to get fried this way and the machine be still able to boot.
For a CMOS battery to get "fried" a number of components would have to fail catastrophically. There are typically layers of protection that fail open and a much higher voltage needs to be able for them to get shorted which is what would be necessary for high voltage to reach CMOS battery.
Now, I am not saying that CMOS batteries weren't hurt. I am saying that it is inconceivable that you would get number of servers that had CMOS batteries hurt and then boot up fine when they are changed for new ones.
Hate to break it to you, the terminals of CMOS battery are typically almost directly attached to a number of chips that are thousands of times more fragile than the battery itself.
Essentially, you can't fry a CMOS battery with a transient without also frying at least couple components that will prevent the motherboard from booting.
Is it possible for a motherboard to get CMOS battery fried without frying anything else vital? Maybe... but...
If you told me that you were in a roll over accident where you did not damage your car roof I would say "well, maybe, highly unlikely but sure, why not, maybe this happened to you". But if you said you were in 17 rollover accidents and in 15 of theme the roof was undamaged I would say "you are full of crap".
It is amazing that you're doubling down after getting downvoted into oblivion and then going off on car accidents? I'm surprised you aren't telling me that there is no way a bird could have fried a transformer... you know, because BIRDS AREN'T REAL. Remind me again, what motivation would I have to lie and make up a story about something like this?
Ok, I give up... you are totally right. All those machines just magically fixed themselves.
I totally agree with twawaaay. There is a huge electrical separation between the incoming mains and the CMOS battery. It is very unlikely that a mains spike could damage the battery without also frying the intervening circuitry.
A more likely explanation is that the faulty servers had quietly deteriorated over the years, until a mains failure caused them to reboot, thus revealing that the batteries were faulty. And if the batteries had been sitting there for sometime with an internal short, then it is also likely that they would have visible damage (eg be leaking).
Also if they had been tested by simply pressing the reset button, they would likely boot just fine. However if they had the mains removed for a hour or so, it would be a different story..
I have been amateur EE and doing electronic repairs for fun for the past 2 decades.
When stuff fails due to external stimulus (like a lightning or connecting it the wrong way) things fail in a typical pattern starting from the power inlet, psu, and propagating into the device until it finds some things that can stop it. Voltage regulators, ripple capacitors, fuses, mosfet switches and so on are almost always dying first before any internal component.
Sometimes you get some stuff that is very fragile get hit somewhere in the middle of the circuit with everything around it intact. This is less likely than a typical path of destruction but happens.
But what you do not see is things that are quite tough get destroyed in a sea of a lot of fragile components that all somehow survive.
And that is because any device HAS to have a number of components on the power supply side that are put there with specific purpose of insulating the device from harmful outside signals as well as insulating outside from harmful signals from inside the device. It is not a choice of the designer, it is a regulatory requirement. You are required to do this to pass various certifications to be able to sell the device at all.
And so in all likelihood you (we) are right. The battery died on its own silently in the server while it was powered up. The battery does not do anything while the server is under power, it only takes over to power the internal RTC while there is no power supplied. Then you restart a number of servers and lo and behold, some of them have a boot warning possibly preventing the machine from rebooting complaining the battery is dead.
The servers were relatively new? It is possibly they were bought in bulk and all had the same faulty battery in them that had very short life span due to manufacturing issue. That isn't very rare.
This is way more likely than a lot of completely fine batteries get hit by a voltage spike in a middle of a fricking motherboard with nothing else damaged, in a large number of servers, the same way.
What you're missing is that this is a totally different set of hardware and circumstances than you've ever experienced in your 2 decades.
Instead of coming out with a know-it-all it-cannot-be-possible attitude, it would be far better to approach things by asking questions or at least having an open mind. Innocent until proven guilty, right?
If anything, in those two decades, you'd have learned to ask basic questions. If you are truly interested in this, you could have asked me for the brand of mobo or to provide photo evidence of the batteries, mobos, etc... or even gone to the datacenter to see for yourself, but instead, you've just had this whole "i am right, you are wrong" attitude that really doesn't get anyone anywhere.
As I said before, I'm not lying. I have no reason to lie about this. It is what we experienced.
This is my last reply to you... waste of enough time.
How does a dead battery prevent a reboot? The battery is isolated by a series diode to prevent it shunting the circuit. Certainly some parameters will be lost (eg time) but it should still boot.
Whatever, it's easy to test. Simply remove the battery from your PC and see if it will reboot. Then clip a lead across the (vacant) battery holder to see if a shorted battery prevents a reboot.
As a hobbyist electrical engineer, one of the most important things I've learned is that at high voltages and/or high currents, our nice lovely lumped element model is not always accurate. There's enough stray inductance and capacitance in random places that with a very fast voltage spike, anything is possible.
Imagine a shipping container full of metal boxes sitting on metal shelves, filled with metal components in a very dusty hot dry environment with fans going in the containers and boxes, pulling megawatts of power and suddenly a bird lands on the transformer.
I'd say anything with electricity is possible at that point.
in California, currently famous as a wildfire center of the West, the local power company (12 million customers?) was required to run power to rural areas long ago. About 40,000 miles of power lines in California are using cable quality from the 1940s, which are illegal to use now in any way. But the cost to replace those lines directly is not eligible for rate increases to customers, so they stay as they are. Yet cutting trees is a cost that is eligible for pay rate increases to customers (roughly, legalese warning).. so more and more trees are cut. Surprise! (not)
Meanwhile "look birds are doing it" is in the headlines..
There is a political panic about this in Sacramento so in 2022, there are some changes, but the details of the wire quality are in this report:
A Study of Risk Assesment and PG&E's GRC ; Liberty Consulting Group 2013
I'm of the opinion its only a matter of time before PG&E and other power companies are seized by the state. What a boon that would be for those under private electric, considering I suffer through no rolling outages at all from public electric in CA. Currently PG&E are paying $25 billion to bury 10,000 miles of line (1). Meanwhile in 2021 the state of california had a 75 billion dollar surplus (2), and in 2022 the state had a 100 billion dollar surplus (3). The state could bury those 40,000 miles with one year's worth of budgetary surplus and no increase to rate payers (how PG&E is coming up with their $25 billion).
They're typically much lower. PG&E customers are mercilessly fleeced. Silicon Valley Power and Palo Alto charge around $0.14/KWh. PG&E averages around 3x as much, though their base rate (whose quota most people handily exceed) is only $0.32/KWh right now.
That the CPUC has let this happen is a shameful failure of governance.
worse, GNewsom is well aware of every part of this. The current Governor grew up with his Father dealing with these topics from the inside for decades. It was a public sport in the 1980-90s to lambast PG&E with detailed litany, and somehow with the power of money and a badge, here we are. Adding to that failure is, the original PG&E that built the infrastructure, was widely regarded with deserved respect. It was an engineering problem in the early days and the engineering management earned their place with many very challenging projects completed successfully.
The executives in place at PG&E successfully branded critics as "extreme lefties" and "uninformed" while keeping ultra-secret records, and it worked.
PGE's awfulness is almost surrealistic, cartoon villain level. Here in Nevada City, they cut a variety of historic trees along Broad street, towards the end of 2020. They had previously agreed to put lines underground and had taken matching money from the city for the project. But then used the excuse of the bankruptcy to renege on the plan. These trees were a tiny fraction of the trees that could fall on their lines and remain up, of course. And they put the lines underground this year, for shits and giggles as well.
Oh, we actually did an urban sit against the tree cutting and saved maybe one tree in the end. But hey.
Of course, all these shenanigans are nothing compared to the people they killed in Colma, Santa Rosa and elsewhere.
I don't know the details specific to this case, but its a hard problem. Wires from that long ago had different tech, and may have faced metal shortages from world events. I would not try to imply it was a malicious thing.
Europeans don't get it. They don't have a lot of overhead wires. Everything is buried because everything is so dense that its cost effective to do so.
Overhead wires are cheap to put up, and EXTREMELY expensive to replace. It's dangerous work. And it's slow. You can't just turn off people's power, so the lines are live while they do replacements. 40k miles is going to cost tens of billions of dollars and take... way longer than anyone is going to budget time for. It's probably just not possible.
Tree cutting usually refers to trimming branches so the canopy is not near the wire. It's far from a perfect solution. There's almost always regulatory requirements to do this.
Meanwhile the forests are all super dry and have years of extra brush at the bottom because the state has done a terrible job of forestry management. It's a tough situation.
agree with the substance of your comments if not the spin, however please note that in California, the large majority of lands are Federal not State. Add to that the private lands, and also a remarkable mess of tiny borders and claims even deep in the woods, and you get an idea of how things are legally here.
There'd be a good portion of California that was very suited to home solar: remote, sparse, sunny, little shading. I wonder if they could incentivise some areas to do away with power cables by subsidising solar and home batteries? Or somehow minimise the powerlines required?
That sounds like just doing away with the grid, and my understanding is the utilities have the legal monopoly on whatever resource because the government wanted a stable grid over a hyper efficient market
> To better document this fowl play, Taylor Barnes, a biologist at EDM International, an engineering consultancy firm in Colorado, collected data on wildfires across the United States. He and his colleagues used Google Alerts to monitor fires started by birds between 2014 and 2018, using keyword pairs: “fire” and “eagle,” for example.
So their "research" consisted of casual Googling? They didn't even cross-check any Fire Service, insurance, or other sources about the causes of wildfires?
> says Antoni Margalida, a conservation biologist at the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology who has studied the impacts of wildfires caused by birds and other fauna in Spain but who was not involved with the work.
and then they quote a guy who "has studied" it in Spain but wasn't involved with this. Then they quote two other studies from four years ago.
What was Sabine Hossenfelder saying just the other day about science journalism and why it's so bad?
There is nothing wrong at all with the segments of the article you quoted. The main premise presented in the article is that electrocuted birds are a plausible cause of wildfires, in addition to human activity (the article specifically reports that human activity is the primary cause of wildfires).
The authors' methodology to find online reports was valid. They used alerts to collect online published reports of electrocuted birds, and then manually checked each report to discard any that were speculative or lacked hard evidence. After this, the authors found 44 reports of electrocuted birds causing wildfires. At most, your strongest critique is that the methods could have been more comprehensive to find additional reports. That is technically correct, but it doesn't invalidate the main premise that wildfires caused by birds do happen, and are not one-off phenomena (via the 44 reports from the described method).
>"and then they quote a guy who "has studied" it in Spain but wasn't involved with this."
It is responsible and encouraged behavior to quote someone who wasn't involved with the study. This avoids bias where the only interviewed people are affiliated with the study, and are more likely to talk it up. Interviewing uninvolved experts in the field opens the door to possible critiques.
>"Then they quote two other studies from four years ago."
Four years isn't inherently long ago enough to be irrelevant. This is especially true when the premise is that electrocuted birds have been a significant cause of wildfires, not just one-off occurrences.
Oh, come off it. This might be respectable as a high school science project. "What percentage of forest fires were caused by birds?" would be one question I'd expect to see answered.
Their reports were from five years ago and covered a four-year period. They did some half-hearted Google searching, and ignored, say, [1] and [2], from agencies with a vested interest in investigating the causes of fires, or the Audobon Society [3], which of course is interested in birds and transmission lines.
You sound like someone involved in the field. If this is the case, I may see where you're coming from in terms of arguing for perfectionism, thoroughness, and notability.
However, as someone unfamiliar about the issue, the subject is still notable and interesting enough to warrant coverage in a news article. None of the information was wrong, and the article's headline only set the expectation to support the premise that 'electrocuted birds are sparking wildfires.' Plenty of users thought the article was notable enough to vote for it to appear on the front page of HN. There was nothing incorrect or unethical about the article to warrant the argument that this is an example of irresponsible reporting.
Suitably, the paper was published in the peer-reviewed "Wildlife Society Bulletin" journal, far less prestigious than Nature or Science. The news article was published in Science's news section, and wasn't a cover story or feature of the Scientific American or The New Yorker. Nothing about the work claimed to be a comprehensive treatise of the subject.
Instead of harshly criticizing the news article or paper (which presented valid data collected in a reasonable way), you could instead use your energy and expertise to either publish a better study in a more prestigious journal to add to your publication count if you're an academic, or get paid by freelancing a more in-depth article for the Scientific American or The Atlantic/equivalent magazine if you're a writer.
"Birds cause some fires" is a conclusion you can find with a minimal search on Google Scholar. It's been documented before. That seems to be the only contribution of this paper.
This was voted onto the front page of Hacker News. That was a mistake. End of story.
In the paragraph immediately following the one you quote:
The scientists then discounted any speculative reports, only keeping those with evidence of a bird as the cause. These could include a photograph of a burned bird carcass at the fire’s ignition site, or a statement made by an expert, such as a firefighter, detailing the presumed cause of the fire. Finally, they checked to see whether any particular environment was especially susceptible to these fires.
Your point is, they were careful to winnow down the data?
Yes, but they started with a faulty data collection method, so if anything, they were probably understating the problem. Also not comparing their results to those from other methods of fire investigation, which surely are also being practiced.
Kind of like looking for your lost keys under the street lamp, because the light is better there.
The authors' claim wasn't to give a comprehensive figure of the number of electrocuted birds that caused wildfires, in a specific region over a specific time. Instead, their goal was to establish that electrocuted birds is a significant reason for wildfires, rather than very rare events.
This is useful because, even without a comprehensive figure, the article still provides convincing evidence for companies that may consider upgrading systems to prevent bird electrocution. For example, from the article: "Electric utility companies can insulate wires and install spikes to discourage perching; they could also build structures that allow for safer perching on transformers."
To a bird being able to start a fire, there must be a minimum of flammable material under the lines (typically placed in a firebreak or a road).
Firebreaks are maintained and often de-soiled until bare rock or mineral soil, and asphalt is not flammable by default. Thus, even if eagles can be a problem, there must be more factors involved here. Are we neglecting the firebreaks?
It feels (again) like hunting for excuses to blame nature. Local politicians said just today, to the furious people complaining for the low number of firefighters movilised in Zamora, that "nature is the problem".
This is not an acceptable answer anymore, specially not by the same people saying publicly a few days ago that "environmental laws are unfair and we refuse to obey them". And a few days later a wildfire eats a beautiful area with a large reservoir of water in the middle, a fair amount of wild herbivores eating flammable material, oak forests, and that has not burned in decades. Now the problem of culling wolves to appease greedy tools is solved. By fire. God answered our prayers. How lucky we are.
Politicians wave the racing flag of "environmental laws are a joke and now all is allowed" and wildfires answer the call. Every-single-time. Burning millions of euro. Curious. Really curious.
"Blaming nature" isn't my read of this. It's simply tracing a source of ignition events.
We already know that much of the Western US is an absolute tinder-box. Absolutely massive historic blazes have been initiated by mowing grass, by catalytic converters on automobiles, by vehicles suffering blowouts and sparks thrown off by the rim, by broken glass. And by many, many lightning strikes.
We're also aware that other power-line related issues have sparked massive wildfires.
That birds are also a concern gives clarity on the problem. This may mean that further monitoring (detecting surge transients and launching rapid fire response or powerline management), or redesigning or retrofiting transmission equipment to reduce risks, is to be considered.
Science moves in very small increments. This increments is "yes, birds do spark some fires".
NB: brush clearing at the scale of remote powerline equipment is all but certainly not viable. Utilities are barely able to keep up with lesser operations such as tree-trimming near lines, and even that with equipment that looks like it came from Dr. Evil's laboratory:
Last week: "we, the government of Castilla will rebeal against prohibition of chasing wolves following other rebel local governments" (Wolf is a protected species, so what they were saying is: we don't want to follow the law).
A few days later. Casually, the biggest wildfire registered to date in Spain started in the area with more wolves of Spain, a well known place that had a big touristic appeal, lots of deer, and with registered basically no wolf attacks to cattle.
But lets blame the timber for wildfires that start in the tongues of politicians. Breastfeed the crazy, harvest what you sow. It happened every single time in the last years.
So currently there is some pressure to blame... for example, the birds that drop dead in the firebreak under the line. Because firebreaks are superflammable it seems. Better than fix the wires.
It is climate change rapidly drying out areas that previously were not as dry. So you have decades of excess carbon in timber that the land can no longer sustain. You don't have to get into scenarios involving wolves, Castilla, and arson.
Same as the birds, it so simple: the stochastic cause of the fire is irrelevant. It could be a spark from a line, a electrocuted small animal, a squatting vagrant making dinner, or even lupine hating Spaniards... but that happened before all the time, and it didn't result in the most massive and intense wildfires in human history.
The subject of the cause of wildfires is being studied intensely by specialists, and by partisans, and by horrified and urgent public individuals, at this time. California has the ability to collect data and study in ways that can be applied to other fire-prone landscapes where there are fewer resources. Current research shows that the large majority of wildfires in California are caused by humans at this time. A parent comment here ("stochastic") is basically accurate. (references on request) Dry lightening is also a leading cause of wildfire in the dry season, and was the cause of many, many simultaneous fires recently in California.
There is not such thing as an excess carbon in tinder. The normal way is that this tinder will became soil, soaked in water. The more older the forests, the more humid the place, unless we reset it removing the water and the soil, by frequent deliberate burning.
...and the reason they're sparking wildfires is because there's excess tinder due to human interference with the natural wildfire cycle, and that tinder is very dry because of human-induced climate change.
We're also destroying the food sources and habitat for birds.
As long as Americans consider themselves entitled to city-like services wherever they can clear land to build a house, there’s going to be a problem.
Most modern rural Americans are not active participants in agriculture, which was the case back when the federal government originally subsidized rural electrification. It’s a lifestyle decision for a large portion of the current rural population, and one that those of us who accepted smaller houses or apartments with little to no land generously subsidize with our similar electric rates and low fuel taxes.
What exactly do you mean? If you mean electricity or internet, I’d have to disagree. It’s important for those to be universal.
Water, sewage, or gas, I could kind of understand. But in rural areas, you dig a well, use a septic tank, and have a propane tank. Not relying on city infra.
For services like hospitals or restaurants, rural areas don’t have great access to those.
It doesn’t feel like there is a problem in general like you describe.
My family members on a rural volunteer fire brigade have put out a few fires caused by a brushtail possum being electrocuted on a pole mounted transformer and then fleeing to nearby trees in panic while on fire.
I know that there are problems with burying high-tension lines (they give off heat, basically) but around here most of the normal "household power lines" are buried and it greatly reduces snow load problems, downed branches, and critters eating them.
There are other issues other than just the heat of power lines. The earth itself has effects of the electromagnetic waves on the wire, burying the lines changes the capacitance of the system. This means there are a lot of other design considerations to the whole system that need to be accounted for and handled other than just burying the cables in the ground.
You're then also massively increasing the cost of the cable. The overhead lines use the ground as the ground while buried cables need sheathing. You're also then increasing cost from all the insulators and protecting of the cable to bury it compared to just having the wire exposed.
Things aren't too challenging when you're only talking a few kV, but once you're dealing with 35kV+ transmission lines things start getting complicated and messy.
I hear this pretty much every time that it's brought up around Europeans, and I was thinking about what it would take for us to change this. I think the biggest issue is that you'd have to somehow get the private property rights sorted out in order to dig up thousands and thousands of people's front yards, and that's probably the biggest factor in why we keep on letting this happen to ourselves. It's kinda like the biggest challenge is NIMBYism (Not in my backyard-ism) but front yard instead.
The other comments talk about technical challenges but at least you guys aren't massively on fire every year. You would think that would be compelling or something right?
I currently live in a suburb of a large German city, in a neighborhood packed with row houses and low-rise apartments. My father lives in west Texas in a neighborhood with maybe 50 households, each on their own 1-10 acres, 30 miles from the nearest town.
What is the per-household cost to my utility to maintain the buried lines for my neighborhood, versus what would the per-household cost be to my father’s utility to bury the lines to his little neighborhood?
Since you mentioned Texas... In certain parts of inner Houston, there is still pole mounted power. When hurricanes inevitably roll into town, the parts of town with pole utilities lose power for far longer (days-weeks) than other parts of town with buried utilities (hours-days).
The homeowner stuff is actually easier than it might seem - almost universally the main problem is cost. People with power lines across their property already have an easement and the connection to the pope/box is easy enough to run underground with a pig and little disturbance.
Our town has it because the town has its own town-owned power company and they don’t care for multiple callouts during winter. Other older, richer areas nearby don’t have it.
Homeowners are generally in favor of it - as it makes the area look nicer and if you do have an easement it’ll drop from like 40 ft to ten or so.
On occasion, also a dead possum at the source of ignition. One memorable example, the possum jumped from the power pole into a nearby hedge, so the fire started at the top.
Pretty much all wooden power poles in NZ have metal bands on them to try to prevent possums climbing them, but it's not 100% effective.
How has this not been a problem for the ~70 years leading up to the dates in the story? Many of the power lines here in CA have been around since the 40s, yet birds are only now catching fire?
Maybe because we're getting drier and warmer than ever. Maybe because of more encroachment on the UWI leading to more chances of an incident. Maybe it always has been a problem but the cause has not been documented so causation was not associated.
I’m a sample size of one, but I have witnessed two birds exploding on power lines and found the fried bodies of two more in my front yard. My guess is that this happens a lot.
The last one I found in my yard was still clinging to the power line above. The feet stayed and the rest of it shot off about twenty feet into my garden (though not sure if something dragged it there).
I can’t imagine how many animals die on these things given how many tens of thousands of km power lines are out there.
Climate change, that is causing extraordinary, anomalous heat and drought, is resulting in previously unremarkable incidents like birds being electrocuted triggering massive wildires.
How much would it realistically cost to rebuild the electrical infrastructure so this doesn't end up costing places like the state of California even more in damages? I know PG&E is pretty much bankrupt over this but I really see this on the utilities companies to replace their 100+ year old infrastructure with something that isn't a massive catastrophic risk factor for everyone, man woman child and critter, anywhere near those buzzing lines...
PG&E is not "pretty much bankrupt" over this .. in fact, during the Enron power scandal, public court documents uncovered a decades-old transfer of cash out of the PG&E books (highly regulated) into new holding companies that were purchasing income-generating assets around the US, like under-valued power generation in the deep South for example. This was expressly forbidden in every regulatory ruling and yet upper management at the time found a way to do it "legally". It has continued in patterns like that for more than thirty years. The recent court-induced liability for death, and criminal conviction of PG&E, are only now changing systems in place for decades.
You have been "had" -- source: attorney consulting on the Enron proceedings at the time of the blackouts
One option is to bury all those lines. This is possible in theory, but not in practice. If you did this, then you also have to worry about all the future issues with power lines you can't see or maybe even find anymore.
At this point, if power bills are going to be $600 a month anyway, it makes waaay more sense for everyone to buy minisplits (w/high HSPF), prismatic lifepo4 cells, BMSs, Chinese solar panels, and a few inverters. You'll have the solar paid off in just 3 years with 44kwh storage, probably 12kw array. 4 years if you have someone else install it.
> Birds of prey—particularly those with large wings such as buzzards and eagles—are especially vulnerable to electrocution at power poles, says Graham Martin, an ornithologist at the University of Birmingham. “When landing or taking off from the perch, they are likely to touch two wires simultaneously.”
After power was restored later that day, the maintenance guy came by to see if things were OK, and he explained that a squirrel had chewed into the power line.
It did freak me out a bit that in the washing machine's behavior I was indirectly seeing the death throes of the squirrel.