Friday, October 11, 2002
Heat-seeking squirrel causes outage during "Squirrel Awareness Week"
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
KENNEWICK, Wash. -- A squirrel's search for warmth caused a power outage that left downtown residents and businesses in the cold for an hour during National Squirrel Awareness Week.
About 1,700 customers were without electricity for about an hour at midday Thursday, said Karen Miller, a spokeswoman for the Benton County Public Utility District.
She blamed the outage on a heat-seeking squirrel that got entangled in some switches at a substation near Kennewick General Hospital, shorting out a critical circuit. No major problems were reported.
Squirrels -- singled out for recognition in the second week of October, according to a number of Web sites -- are the utility's leading cause of outages.
The utility has spent tens of thousands of dollars on shields and squawkers, devices that mimic the sounds of birds that prey on squirrels, cutting the number of squirrel-caused outages from 732 in 1998 to about 400 last year, service technician Kyle Pease said.
Even so, Pease added, "when one gets us, it gets us bad."
Information from: Tri-City Herald
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