According to Fried Squirrel Fails to Find Favor With Public Utilities, squirrels have become a serious, serious problem for electric companies:
Robin Folcik was reading the newspaper at her breakfast table one Sunday last August when the lights blinked, smoke poured from the sockets, and a charged buzz came over the room, making the hair on her arms stand up.“I thought my house was blowing up,” recalls Ms. Folcik, a waitress in Southington, Conn.
An inquiry into the matter by Connecticut Light & Power found “remnants of a squirrel” and shards of a ceramic electrical switch at the base of utility pole #85324. The conclusion: The critter had electrocuted itself and, in so doing, triggered a massive power surge that blew out appliances and television sets all over the neighborhood.
Countermeasures haven’t worked. The squirrels are winning:
Longmont Power & Communications, which serves 35,000 customers north of Denver, says that more than 90% of its significant outages are caused by squirrels, which cut the power 393 times in 2002, up from 349 two years earlier. The increase took place despite measures Longmont has taken to thwart squirrels by banding utility poles with slippery, hard plastic.In the past two years, the municipal electricity system in Tullahoma, Tenn., spent more than $25,000 on “Varmint Shields” — dark-gray plastic disks that look like barbecue grills — so squirrels can’t cause trouble at various hot spots, including transformers. But the utility considers the effort a “limited” success, given that it has reduced squirrel outages to 136 in 2002, from the 148 it reported in 1997.