Hat tip to Inkle-mamma for finding this story.
Squirrels briefly kill power in 2 cities
ASHLAND, Wis. – It was an unlucky day for two squirrels and hundreds of Midwestern power customers.
Brian Elwood, a spokesman for Xcel Energy, said a squirrel came in contact with an overhead transformer and knocked out service to 177 customers Monday. Power was fully restored in just under an hour, and repair crews found the remains of the “unfortunate squirrel,” he said.
By coincidence, another squirrel got into a substation 40 miles away in Ironwood, Mich., Monday morning and caused a temporary outage that affected about 1,400 customers in Ironwood and two nearby communities, Elwood said.
Evidently they weren’t happy with trying to take out individual motorists by running across roads. They’ve decided to try and take down the infrastructure of small town America. If we thought we were safe in the midwest, we need to think again.
Either that, or they were Packer fans who had just a little bit too much cheese and Blatz on the brain; it’s a wonder more of them don’t die in this manner.
4 responses so far ↓
gabrielle eden // November 21, 2007 at 2:46 am
At last – a true AKJ story!
Bike Bubba // November 21, 2007 at 2:52 am
I’ve had the squirrels take out my house’s power a time or two–the coop employees who fix the damage see this so often, many of them actually make a “game” out of finding the “fixins for Brunswick Stew.”
guitarman // November 21, 2007 at 8:39 am
Those suirrels are in the news more than just about anything lately. I just blogged about a Hmong hunter who mistook a walking hunter 40 feet away for squirrel!
Palm boy // November 21, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Packs 9-1.
I like how the story reports the squirels as victims here, not the terrorists.