Squirrels vs. the U.S. power grid
Some say the world will end in fire. Some say ice. Some say coordinated kamikaze attacks on the power grid by squirrels.
At least, some have been saying that to me, when they find out I’ve spent the summer keeping track of power outages caused by squirrels.
Power outages caused by squirrels are a persnickety and constantly updating data set that hums along behind the rest of my life the way baseball statistics or celebrity-birthing news might for other people. It started in April, after I read about a squirrel that electrocuted itself on a power line in Tampa, Fla., cutting electricity to 700 customers and delaying statewide achievement tests at three nearby schools. I was curious, just enough to set up a Google news alert: squirrel power. As the summer progressed and the local news reports of power outages caused by squirrels piled up in my inbox, my interest in power outages caused by squirrels became more obsessive.
Since Memorial Day, I’ve cataloged reports of 50 power outages caused by squirrels in 24 states. Fifteen hundred customers lost power in Mason City, Iowa; 1,500 customers in Roanoke, Va.; 5,000 customers in Clackamas County, Ore.; and 10,000 customers in Wichita, Kan. A month later, there were two separate POCBS, as I’ve come to call power outages caused by squirrels, around the small town of Evergreen, Mont., on a single day.
Squirrels cut power to a regional airport in Virginia, a Veterans Affairs medical center in Tennessee, a university in Montana and a Trader Joe’s in South Carolina. Five days after the Trader Joe’s went down, another squirrel cut power to 7,200 customers in Rock Hill, S.C., on the opposite end of the state. Nine days later, 3,800 more South Carolinians lost power after a squirrel blew up a circuit breaker in the town of Summerville.
In Portland, Ore., squirrels got 9,200 customers on July 1; 3,140 customers on July 23, and 7,400 customers on July 26. In Kentucky, more than 10,000 people lost power in two separate POCBS a few days apart. The town of Lynchburg, Va., suffered large-scale POCBS on two consecutive Thursdays in June. Downtown went dark. At Lynchburg’s Academy of Fine Arts, patrons were left to wave their lighted iPhone screens at the art on the walls, like torch-carrying Victorian explorers groping through a tomb.
Squirrels have been causing power outages since long before I started cataloging power outages caused by squirrels. In 1987, a squirrel shut down the Nasdaq for 82 minutes and another squirrel shut down the Nasdaq again in 1994, a seminal bit of POCBS history that was sometimes noted in coverage of the power outage at the Nasdaq in August, which was a power outage not caused by squirrels.
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.
And yet the grid is actually designed to handle this violent interruption. As soon as the dead animal drops to the ground, eliminating the interference, the flow of electricity should resume. But if the squirrel doesn’t fall off the equipment, the squirrel can trigger a so-called continuous fault, interrupting the restarted flow of electricity all over again. It’s a zombie attack: a lingering, second wave of obstruction.
Occasionally, a POCBS will generate an idiosyncratic storm of ancillary mayhem. I’ve read about a squirrel that, last February, chewed into high-voltage lines near a water-treatment facility, setting off a chain of events that forced the city of Tampa to boil its water for the next 37 hours, and I’ve read about a flaming squirrel that allegedly fell from a utility pole in April and started a 2-acre grass fire outside Tulsa, Okla.
Olearczyk insists that there is no credible way to estimate the number of power outages caused by squirrels nationwide.
What exists, instead, are only flecks of information, the partial outline of a very annoying apparition. In Austin, Texas, squirrels have been blamed for 300 power outages a year. Other utility companies have claimed that between 7 and 20 percent of all outages are caused by some sort of wild animal, and a 2005 study by the state of California estimated, hazily, that these incidents cost California’s economy between $32 million and $317 million a year. Feral cats, raccoons and birds are also nuisances. Last month, reports surfaced in Oklahoma of great horned owls dropping snakes onto utility poles, thereby causing frequent power outages. Still, no one seems to dispute the disruptive primacy of squirrels.
However, Olearczyk believes strongly that power outages caused by squirrels are on the decline. For at least a decade, utility companies have been tricking out their equipment with an array of wildlife deterrents to combat the problem, like “arrester caps” and “bushing covers,” the Southwire SquirrelShield, the E/Getaway Guard and free-spinning baffles to make squirrels lose their balance.
The industry has also researched discouraging squirrels by spraying utility poles with fox urine and painting equipment red, though both of these tactics have failed; it’s not even clear whether squirrels can see the color red. Some utilities have installed the kind of plastic owl used to keep pigeons off building facades. However, an industry study notes, “one utility reported that the fake owl was attacked by a hawk, which in turn caused a substation outage.”
I’ve come to see each POCBS as a reminder of our relative size on the landscape, recalibrating our identity as one set of creatures in a larger ecology. A power outage caused by a squirrel feels so surprising only because we’ve come to see our electrical grid as a constant. Electricity everywhere, at the flick of a switch, seems like the natural order, while the actual natural order—the squirrel programmed by evolution to gnaw and eat acorns and bask and leap and scamper—winds up feeling like a preposterous, alien glitch in that system. It’s a pretty stunning reversal, if you can clear the right kind of space to reflect on it, and fortunately power outages caused by squirrels do that for you by shutting off your TV and internet.