The Washington Post reports on the relative threat posed to American infrastructure from squirrels as opposed to cyberattack following last month’s hacker-caused outage in Ukraine. The “furrier threat,” researchers say, is responsible for more outages and is tracked by the American Public Power Association’s “Squirrel Index.” The rodents have become a symbol among some security experts of what they call an “alarmist tone” in policy discussions on the threat from cyber. One such anonymous individual operates CyberSquirrel1.com, a humorous take on “unclassified” reports of “squirrel operations” that affect the grid.
The Post article includes “A terrifying and hilarious map of squirrel attacks on the U.S. power grid”
In my neighborhood, squirrels take out transformers at a rate of one per month. It usually happens around 2-3 am - with a loud boom. We got used to it.
A squirrel caused a transformer right outside of my parents’ house to blow a few years ago. Scared the ever-lovin’ crap out of me. I legitimately thought a bomb went off or something.
Squirrels are evil, the current Geico commercial describes it well “Squirrels are back in the attic, and this time it is personal”. I ended up with several months of trapping the little SOB’s in my attic, and also in figuring out how they were getting in, then had to spend time fixing the damage they caused, including at least one piece of Romex gnawed through. What is amazing is despite how destructive they are, it is illegal to kill them (least it is in my area), law requires they be trapped humanely and let go someplace else.
I heard that in California, we can only kill a certain kind of squirrels – I think they are fox (foxy?) squirrels.
In our area, there are many squirrels. There is a relatively small squirrel in our neighborhood. We saw it frequently near where we live. But we did not see it in the past few days. It could have been killed. I do not know what is their typical life span.
I once saw a squirrel jumping from a branch of one tree to a branch of another tree. Amazing skills!
Owls! We have one living in our backyard. Transformers are still exploding regularly… Owls present a different threat to the power grid: in Eastern WA, an owl carrying a stolen chicken decided to land on a power line with the chicken dangling below… their charred remains were discovered when the wildfire started by the short was extinguished.
We live near a nature center and there are masses of various of squirrels residing in our neighborhood. But the biggest aggravation are the huge numbers of black squirrels, which all desperately need to run out in front of your car at the exact moment that you drive by. Some days I will have to slam on the brakes 10 different times just to get down the street because they just come racing out from nowhere. I’m pretty sure they do it deliberately. I keep wondering how many generations of squirrels it takes for natural selection to evolve some sense into them.
I remember going to DC and noticing the squirrels near the monuments were actually begging for food! I’d never seen anything like it. It was also the first time I’d seen a black squirrel, which was jarring at first.
There are lots of black squirrels in the DC area. I asked about it once at a nature center and they said that they’re just a genetic variance, and one that would be disadvantageous in nature because it makes them easier for other predators to see against tree bark which is usually gray. Squirrels in that area are very numerous and very bold and the deer aren’t far behind!
Not just squirrels. When communications cable was laid across the Atlantic, sharks were biting into it.
I’m pretty sure squirrels run in front of traffic deliberately, too. I figure it’s some sort of peer pressure and imagine the boys ragging, c’mon man, you can do it, you a squirrel or a chicken?
