"I am become death, destroyer of convenience."
They run up power lines, chew anything that looks like it carries more than 1,000 volts of electricity, and die. Other times, they acrobatically stretch to grab both the power line and the transformer to try their hand at being a conduit for high-voltage electricity flow, and die. It's like there's a specific bloodline of squirrels whose only purpose in the universe is to knock out the power while you're right in the middle of a Supernatural marathon.
It isn't a small problem, either. Squirrels cause thousands of blackouts every year. A company in Nebraska found that squirrels cause more power outages per year than lightning. In Austin, where squirrels cause 300 power outages a year, Austin Energy is spending more than $100,000 annually to install technology to protect their grid from squirrels ("technology" here meaning "giant hunks of squirrel-deflecting metal"), which seems like an unnecessary amount of money until you consider that the squirrels caused an estimated $2 million worth of damage to their grid in a single year. There have been terrorist cells that were less effective in disrupting government infrastructure.
Andy Sotiriou/Photodisc/Getty Images
It's an adorable jihad against your ability to use Spotify.
But they're hardly the only enemy, and they may not even be the most ridiculous. Back in 2003, there was a massive blackout that cut power to over 50 million people in Canada and the United States, and it wasn't caused by an ice storm or an atomic monster -- that sprawling power outage happened because a tree branch scraped up against a power line. That's it.
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