If you enjoy the irony in the fact that the great East Coast blackout of 2003 was largely caused by a few untrimmed trees, then you’re going to love Jon Mooallem’s account of how America’s squirrels are wreaking havoc on America’s electricity system.
Using a Google news alert, he’s cataloged 50 squirrel-caused power outages in 24 states — and that’s just since Memorial Day. These aren’t small outages either. Several of them have cut power to thousands of people at a time. Back in 1994, a squirrel took out the Nasdaq. These are kamikaze raids and they’ve led to an interesting phenomenon — technology developed specifically to protect our infrastructure from furry, tree-hopping rodents.
Pictured: The face of pure evil, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from binaryape’s photostream