Squirrels stole a chunk of fiber we had between two buildings years ago. They used it to make nests with. We even had a video of them hanging upside down going along the supporting cable. Cost us 3 days of downtime though (this was internal office network).<p>mitigation was simply rubbing vaseline (petroleum jelly) all over it once a quarter so they just fell off.<p>Wildlife is incredibly destructive :)
Koprowski's explanation from the last page is probably the most correct part of the article. Having done some time in the "greater telecom biz" I assure you that squirrels do not solely eat copper power wires, they are ravenous for aerial optical fiber and most any coaxial cable (CATV, communications/RF stuff, etc)<p>I have not studied this at length but I'm told the carcass from turning a squirrel into a power line fuse is substantially different than the carcass from shorting out a couple KW of broadcast transmitter RF and a tech can tell at a glance which cabling needs replacing when they see a smoking carcass on the ground. But I never worked outside plant so this might just be a tall tale they tell cubie dwellers.<p>Unlike what the article claims, I'm told there's off the shelf nearly perfect repellants based on hot sauce and at least some cables like coax are often flooded with a dielectric gel which is designed to taste awful, or so they claim.
<i>Matthew Olearczyk, a program manager with the Electric Power Research Institute, explains that typically a squirrel will cause a blackout by scampering across electrical equipment and touching simultaneously both an energized component, like one of the cylindrical transformers at the top of a utility pole, and a grounded piece of equipment. The squirrel completes the circuit, generating an arc. There is an instantaneous flash of blue light. At its center is the squirrel, combusting.</i><p>It's written in a very Dave Barry sensibility throughout.
2009: 'A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut... As a result, temperatures in part of the LHC's circuit climbed to almost 8 Kelvin - significantly higher than the normal operating temperature of 1.9, and close to the temperature at which the LHC's niobium-titanium magnets are likely to "quench", or cease superconducting and become ordinary "warm" magnets.'<p>[1] <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/lhc_bread_bomb_dump_incident/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/lhc_bread_bomb_dump_...</a>
Peter Neumann has collected extensive archives on squirrelcides resulting in power failures. Search the RISKS archive at <a href="http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/RISKS" rel="nofollow">http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/RISKS</a> for lots of reports.
I used to work at a large telco in Australia, and one of the most infamous support tickets in the system had the summary "Bird attack at the Hellfire club".<p>The Hellfire club is a BDSM club in Melbourne, and apparently a bird had attacked the cabling leading into the building, bringing down the phone systems.
squirrels are badass. they use the power lines as highways and they even have off-ramps (tree branches). and then there's this squirrel i see sometimes that has dark fur and it isn't afraid of humans and goes right out in the open eating all the nuts that the other human-fearing squirrels would never get close to and one time it gave me this look
They cause quite a few Internet outages too. We have a lot of change management tickets filed under 'squirrel damage' so at some point I started using it for some of my change management requests. BGP blip? God damn squirrels.