The Weirdest Animal-Caused Power Outages
When it comes to animal-caused power outages, things can get a little weird. Although storms get most of the press when it comes to outages, animals like squirrels, birds and racoons literally cause tens of thousands of outages every year. Now granted, these types of outages are usually pretty easy to fix, but their high frequency warrants taking a closer look.
Top-5 Oddest Animal-Caused Power Outages
My friends at T&D World recently published an interesting list of the most unusual animal-triggered outages; you can read the full list here. Below is my “top-5 list” from the article.
- In 2018, a beaver chopped down a tree which caused a wires-down situation and cut the power to about 1,000 Kentucky Power customers.
- In 2005, a snake touched a transformer that triggered an arc flash that knocked out 5 feeder lines, leaving over 5,000 Clay Electric customers in Jacksonville, FL in the dark for hours.
- In 2013, a chicken somehow made its way inside a transformer, causing an hour-long power outage for a bunch of Maui Electric Power customers.
- A swarm of moon jellyfish swam into and clogged the water intake area of Sweden’s Oskarshamn nuclear power plant. This prevented the cooling water from doing its job, and forced the plant operator to kill the power to 5% of the country’s residents while fixing the problem.
- The entire power grid in Kenya collapsed for 4 hours when a single monkey made its way into a transformer that caused a 180MW power plant to go offline.
So, there you have it – my all-time favorite list of the top-5 animal-caused power outages. And these are just the odd ones! Duke Energy alone has experienced thousands of squirrel-caused outages, to the point where the company created a “squirrel index” to track it. So remember, when it comes to emergency preparedness, its certainly not just about the storms.
