This year's inevitable summer blackouts might be caused by extreme weather or too many AC units on the power grid, or they might have a more unique cause. Sometimes they're the product of sabotage, not by hackers but by the animal kingdom. Here are some cases in point.
1. Raccoons
If you thought it was bad when a raccoon got into your garbage just wait until one gets into your neighborhood's electricity infrastructure. One such scamp took out power in Seattle for a few hours, frying itself in the process.
[Three] neighborhoods lost their electricity after the critter roamed into a substation and somehow disrupted the system. The power went out a little before 3 a.m., and soon the utility company for the area was struggling to explain the incident on Twitter.
2. A "rat-like" animal
Two years after the Fukushima meltdowns, the systems dedicated to cooling spent nuclear fuel rods experienced an unexpected 29-hour outage. The cause? A rat, or at least a rat-like animal.
[Tokyo Electric Power Co], also known as Tepco, said it had found a dead rat which appeared to have suffered an electric shock near a temporary switchboard used to supply power to cooling systems at three fuel pools in the facility, devastated by a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
Fortunately, no radiation leaked as a result of the outage and the only casualty was the poor rat.
3. A monkey
In a really impressive blackout earlier this month, a vervet monkey in Kenya knocked out power across the entire country. What's more is that it even survived!
The monkey fell on a transformer at the Gitaru hydroelectric power station on Tuesday, electricity provider KenGen said in a statement.
The transformer then tripped, resulting in the loss of 180 megawatts of power and triggering a blackout across Kenya.
Power was restored almost four hours later and the monkey survived its adventure, KenGen said.
4. Pigeons
In another somewhat unexpected piece of sabotage, a flock of pigeons in Japan caused a blackout not by flying into the business themselves, but rather by just pooping all over the place.
Drivers in Shiojiri and Matsumoto were left stuck in traffic after a buildup of droppings on an electricity substation's insulator short-circuited street signals. Energy company bosses said around three feet of excrement had been allowed to pile up, resulting in power being knocked out across the area. Some 25,000 traffic lights and hundreds of homes reportedly lost power because of the bird dung.
The power company declined to take any preventative measures because the whole thing just seemed so weird. We'll see how that goes.
5. An apparent weasel (or maybe a marten)
Not content to just shut down regular power, a weasel (apparently) took to disabling the Large Hadron Collider earlier this month, humankind's most advanced particle accelerator.
Engineers investigating the mishap found the charred remains of a furry creature near a gnawed-through power cable. A small mammal, possibly a weasel, gnawed-through a power cable at the Large Hadron Collider.
"We had electrical problems, and we are pretty sure this was caused by a small animal," says Arnaud Marsollier, head of press for CERN, the organization that runs the US$7 billion particle collider in Switzerland. Although they had not conducted a thorough analysis of the remains, Marsollier says they believe the creature was "a weasel, probably.”
Later investigations revealed the creature may have actually been a marten which, though not technically a weasel, is sufficiently weasel-y to be called such, in my opinion.
6. A chicken
An unfried chicken got a little fed up with its situation at an airport in Maui in 2013. It evidently sought to rectify the situation. As reported by the Associated Press:
[A] chicken got into a Maui Electric Co. transformer in the rental car area at Kahului Airport on Tuesday afternoon. The chicken caused a power outage that left some passengers having to disembark their planes by mobile stairway.
7. A frankly absurd number of squirrels
Of course, if any of these other animals can cause a power outage, so can a squirrel. But what you might not expect is exactly how many squirrels cause power outages. According to CyberSquirrel1, a site that catalogs incidents of squirrel-caused outages, there have been no less than 700 in the United States so far (also a few hundred birds and a few dozen raccoons and snakes).
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