Power station incursions yield fried raccoon.
Posted on 06/26/2015 3:23:08 PM PDT by BenLurkin
June through October of 2011, at least 15,000 residences and businesses across Ohio were rendered powerless by animal incursions into electrical substations. Substation outages knocked out traffic signals, forced emergency teams into action and resulted in significant, unplanned repair expenses for utilities.
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In addition to the financial strain outages place on utilities, they can also result in lost revenue for business customers, damage to infrastructure, costs related to emergency crews and first responders, and other expenses beyond substation repair. Last but not least, substation outages can lead customers to doubt the reliability of their power supplier.
According to The Journal of Wildlife Management, animals enter electrical substations for a variety of reasons. Squirrels often enter substations in search of shelter. Cats and snakes seek the eggs and young of the birds that nest in electrical substations. Raccoons might enter substations out of sheer curiosity.
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Besides the predicable squirrel and raccoon culprits, other, less-typical animals are also responsible for disrupting substations in different regions of the country, including marmots in Colorado and Cuban tree frogs in Florida. Snakes represent one of the fastest-growing causes of animal-caused outages, particularly for power providers in the south and southwestern U.S.
Utility managers have worked to devise all manner of applications to keep climbing animals away from their equipment: specialized bushing guards, heat shrink tapes, tubing-even low-tech approaches such as greasing poles or placing predator decoys at a substation's perimeter. But, as anyone with a birdfeeder can attest, an animal will pursue a goal for as long as it takes to achieve it.
(Excerpt) Read more at utilityproducts.com ...
They left Democrats and leftists off the list.
If we find a small enough Democrat we could launch her in using a trebuchet.
The squirrels have declared war on my yard lighting . . .
In Texas the Rat Snake was famous for causing outage in Substations.
They would enter the station at night climb up the side of the transformers looking in the cooling radiators for bird nests.
Most utilities I am aware of put down a 4” pipe around the transformer with electric fence conductor on insulators. They put grounded hardware cloth under that and hook it with one of those 100 Mile fence chargers.
even snakes don’t like to get shocked.
Sounds like the animals are so frustrated with their congressional representation that they are committing suicide.
The more snakes get fried, the better.
But sometimes, the power lines even get attacked from above:
http://www.realtree.com/deer-hunting/news/eagle-drops-fawn-on-powerline
When i was going to college in Fresno on the last day of finals a squirrel wiped out the transformer and knocked out power for the entire college. The squirrel is still on display in the biology building.
There is a reason they are called ground squirrels....
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