Posted on 01/29/2014 2:51:30 PM PST by thackney
We may worry about hackers taking down the electrical grid, says Eugene K. Chow at The Week, just like we worry about, for example, bikers hitting frail old ladies crossing the street. But both threats are overblown. Like biker-on-old-lady violence, cyberattacks are so rare that they’re notable — we fear them and talk about them precisely because they don’t happen very often. But the true threat lies elsewhere, with more common villains. On the street, of course, it’s cars. In the nation’s electricity infrastructure, it’s squirrels.
Chow explains:
Even squirrels are proving to be, well, a squirrelly problem. No one really knows how much damage the rodents do, but it’s certainly more than hackers manage. A cursory analysis in The New York Times found that over a four month span last year, squirrels caused at least 50 power outages across the country — and those were just the ones that made the news. And while no one knows how many people are affected by squirrel-related outages each year, in just two days last June, four squirrel-related incidents left more than 18,000 homes in four different states in the dark. How do squirrels manage such mayhem? They simply chew through wires or scamper over fragile electrical equipment.
Of course, it’s possible that the hackers have hacked the squirrels and are controlling their sharp little teeth from Romania. In this day and age, you can never be sure.
The Squirrel Grenade
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1060580/posts
Squirrels have a tough life (well, at least they have personal trainers) around here (Ground hogs, even more so).
I fraught the squirrel war and won. I persueded thr power co CEO that he didn’t have a squirrel problem, he had an engineering problem
All that is necessary is for the head engineer to buy the red rubber sleeves and install them on the transformers.
The fried squirrels or fish or hawks come to an end
This is all due to the shortage of 22LR
Dogs already knew this.
Two days later, I called her and said I was from the SPCA and someone had reported that she hit a squirrel and just kept going instead of reporting it and it was going to cost her a $50 fine.
To make a long story short...she didn't talk to me for 3 days.
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I was at Ft. Benning, GA one time and a squirrel got into a transformer and shorted something out. It knocked-out power to most of the base. They didn’t seem to have much of a back-up power system on base either. Perhaps for the critical communications or something, but I don’t really know for sure. It took several hours to restore power.
Wow, a squirrel ping. Let’s see, does anyone know if here’s a long-eared jerboa ping?
/johnny
One of my bicycles is a Squirrel”
Cyclist parlance for twitchy overly sensitive steering.
It would be the one I have problems avoiding the old-lady on
Keep your squirrel population healthy and well fed.
Look at them as a form of long term food storage for when the Oconomy destroys the world as we know it.
My Granddad owned a Pecan orchard in middle Georgia, and he would charge people a dollar to go in and kill as many squirrels as they wanted.
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