Hard to believe a tiny nut-gathering beast can still disrupt life in the 21st century, even to the point of endangering U.S. national security, but citizens of the Queen City of come to know just how disruptive the little rodents can be.
All it took was one squirrel to put thousands of Bangor, Maine residents – and a critically important airport – in the dark over the busy Thanksgiving weekend.
The power outage besetting Maine’s third-largest city on Sunday was caused by “animal contact on the line,” said Versant power spokesperson Emily Tadlock.
An estimated 3,251 Versant customers lost power, including Bangor International Airport, a preferred emergency stopover for international flights about to go over the Atlantic Ocean as well as the home of the 101st Air National Guard Refueling Wing.
Squirrels have adapted pretty well to avoid getting zapped – and ruining your day as well as their own.
But it still happens occasionally in this modern age. More often than is realized, actually.
Squirrels are far more of a threat than just to your electric coffee pot.
John Inglis, a former deputy director of the U.S. National Security Agency, said in 2015 that the biggest danger facing the nation’s power grid isn’t natural disasters or cyber attacks – it is squirrels.
“Frankly, the No. 1 threat experienced to date by the U.S. electrical grid is squirrels,” Inglis said.
So actual cyber attacks by terrorists are much rarer than disruption caused by squirrels.
Squirrels twice in the past 40 years have twice shut down the world’s busiest financial center, the New York Stock Exchange, in New York City.
A squirrel can easily disrupt power by causing a short circuit when it simultaneously touches an energized wire and another grounded object, like a pole or transformer.
The high voltage is often fatal to the squirrel, and the resulting surge can sometimes cause damage to equipment, such as a transformer. Like the bad guys in “Home Alone,” they just don’t know when to quit.
