Ever had the power go down suddenly at work or your house with seemingly no explanation? A furry tree-dweller may well be the one to point the accusing finger at.
Countless cases of squirrels nibbling on electrical cables have been reported over the years, including an outage in Greenwich, Connecticut that caused 14,500 homes to be without power.
Mike Christian, who is head of business continuity for Yahoo, recently talked about how they had a huge power outage after a squirrel decided to munch on their power cables.
“A frying squirrel took out half our Santa Clara data center two years back,” Christian said in a talk on data centers going down entitled ‘Frying Squirrels and Unspun Gyros’.
Since power outages can be both annoying because you’re suddenly sitting in the dark/lose all productivity, the pesky antics of these nutty critters are certainly an inconvenience.
Backyardnature.com reports that the reason squirrels like to chew on cabling is because they’re always sharpening/shortening their teeth, and they’ve found that electrical wires and hoses are a great source for doing this. While generally non-urban squirrels do this on twigs etc, urban squirrels had to turn to other sources.
There are several methods for stopping squirrels from chewing wiring ranging from spraying the wires with Tabasco sauce to covering the wires with soft insulating material that’s no good for sharpening squirrels teeth and will put them off.
It may seem a bit mad and something that doesn’t happen a whole lot, but squirrels are a huge risk to absolutely anywhere that uses electricity.
Next time your power goes down, always remember: it might be the squirrels.
Written by Bill Earlie at www.tester.co.uk
