Power outages caused by squirrels | Hacker News Reader

Power outages caused by squirrels

nytimes.com

46 pointstod22216 comments

Squirrels stole a chunk of fiber we had between two buildings years ago. They used it to make nests with. We even had a video of them hanging upside down going along the supporting cable. Cost us 3 days of downtime though (this was internal office network).

mitigation was simply rubbing vaseline (petroleum jelly) all over it once a quarter so they just fell off.

Wildlife is incredibly destructive :)

>Wildlife is incredibly destructive :)

Said the guy whose office occupies the space where the trees that grandma and grandpa squirrel used to live in once stood.

Well hardly. The building was built on an old air strip and we had the trees planted!

I agree with your sentiment though entirely.

Koprowski's explanation from the last page is probably the most correct part of the article. Having done some time in the "greater telecom biz" I assure you that squirrels do not solely eat copper power wires, they are ravenous for aerial optical fiber and most any coaxial cable (CATV, communications/RF stuff, etc)

I have not studied this at length but I'm told the carcass from turning a squirrel into a power line fuse is substantially different than the carcass from shorting out a couple KW of broadcast transmitter RF and a tech can tell at a glance which cabling needs replacing when they see a smoking carcass on the ground. But I never worked outside plant so this might just be a tall tale they tell cubie dwellers.

Unlike what the article claims, I'm told there's off the shelf nearly perfect repellants based on hot sauce and at least some cables like coax are often flooded with a dielectric gel which is designed to taste awful, or so they claim.

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.

It's written in a very Dave Barry sensibility throughout.

We've had at least one datacenter power issue where the root cause was a cat. 9 lives tend to get used up quickly when 115kV is involved.

My significant other works at the local power company, I'm always receiving SMS pictures of charred raccoons etc.

Isn't that romantic.

2009: 'A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut... As a result, temperatures in part of the LHC's circuit climbed to almost 8 Kelvin - significantly higher than the normal operating temperature of 1.9, and close to the temperature at which the LHC's niobium-titanium magnets are likely to "quench", or cease superconducting and become ordinary "warm" magnets.'

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/lhc_bread_bomb_dump_...

1945: A Japanese fire balloon[1] was responsible for causing "a short circuit in the power lines supplying electricity for the nuclear reactor cooling pumps" at the Hanford Site of the Manhattan Project -- but "backup safety devices restored power almost immediately".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon

Peter Neumann has collected extensive archives on squirrelcides resulting in power failures. Search the RISKS archive at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/RISKS for lots of reports.

I've had a squirrel segment my Christmas lights into easy to carry pieces twice now :(

I used to work at a large telco in Australia, and one of the most infamous support tickets in the system had the summary "Bird attack at the Hellfire club".

The Hellfire club is a BDSM club in Melbourne, and apparently a bird had attacked the cabling leading into the building, bringing down the phone systems.

squirrels are badass. they use the power lines as highways and they even have off-ramps (tree branches). and then there's this squirrel i see sometimes that has dark fur and it isn't afraid of humans and goes right out in the open eating all the nuts that the other human-fearing squirrels would never get close to and one time it gave me this look

Probably a Crack Squirrel - http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/oct/08/drugsandalcohol.pa...

They cause quite a few Internet outages too. We have a lot of change management tickets filed under 'squirrel damage' so at some point I started using it for some of my change management requests. BGP blip? God damn squirrels.

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