Some adages are global in nature. They are both expressed and apply worldwide. One such adage is: “It’s the little things that get you.”
This
maxim absolutely applies to the electrical power grid. A single branch dropped across power lines
can knock out power for an entire city. In
another example, my neighbor lost power to his house when a bird landed at the
wrong spot on a pole-mounted utility transformer. Poof!
No bird. No power.
The
other day, Dickson Electric System, a small power provider in Tennessee,
experienced the loss of power to a third of its customers thanks to a squirrel’s
errant jump at a substation.
Poof!
Sadly,
squirrels rank as one of the greatest threats to power grid reliability. Each year, hundreds of power outages
worldwide are attributed to squirrels.
According to an article published by Smithsonian Magazine in 2016, here
in Montana alone, squirrels caused an estimated 560 power outages in 2015.
Source: UPI, WSMV.com, smithsonianmag.com
We don’t seem to have squirrels here in Bayawan, just power outages.
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