21 October 2014

Only in Alaska

The Matanuska Electric Association say at least one beaver and two ravens are to blame for power outages that swept from Willow to Talkeetna on Monday morning. 

Around 5:30 a.m. a fallen tree cut power to 11 customers off Willow Fishhook Road. It appears a beaver chewed the tree, which collapsed into a power line and tripped an outage, according to Julie Estey, MEA spokeswoman. 

Power was restored around 8:30 a.m., only to disappear again shortly before 11 a.m. 

This time, two ravens got tangled in a substation in Willow, stripped off one of the breakers and turned off power for about 3,700 customers, Estey said.

"The ravens definitely wreaked havoc on the system," she said. The birds didn't make it out alive.


Long-time readers (all three of you) may remember an outage in the Juneau area, some years ago, caused by an eagle that dropped a moose head on a power line.

I intended to find that link for this story, but found multiple links to subsequent events. It seems that eagles routinely drop food on power lines & transformers. I didn't realize.

See? Even old sourdoughs can learn something new. 

15 comments:

ProudHillbilly said...

Yeesh. I've known the power to get knocked out because a squirrel got into a transformer, but these are definitely different.

Rev. Paul said...

PH - just a bit, yes. :)

Sandy Livesay said...

Rev. Paul,

Who would have thought it?

Birds!!!

Anonymous said...

Down here in the big city, we had a transformer brought down by a house cat who put his paw on one contact, then turned his head into another.
The body was thrown about 100 yards - what was left of it.

gfa

Rev. Paul said...

Sandy, the ravens here are as big as red-tailed hawks, so not as crazy as it sounds.

Guffaw, we learn to never underestimate the power of critters. :)

juvat said...

Who knew Eagles liked fried food?

Rev. Paul said...

juvat, for better or worse, eagles that hang around settled areas tend to become trash scavengers.

Corey said...

Its usually raccoons or possums around here.

Rev. Paul said...

Corey, we had a lot of squirrel/transformer/substation interaction in Missouri, too.

Old NFO said...

Yep, moose head??? That was a BIG eagle!!!

Rev. Paul said...

It really was, NFO. Apparently he could only get a few feet off the ground with it, though, and lost his grip as he passed over a couple of power lines on a lower hillside. Arc happens. :)

Chickenmom said...

Squirrels and fallen trees do most of the damage here. One of our trees fell on the wires this past summer and caused quite a fire!

Rev. Paul said...

Chickenmom, I'm sure it was spectacular, and probably affected quite a large number of folks, too.

Anonymous said...

Hmm,eagle bombers, who knew?

Rev. Paul said...

Individual eagles don't have much in the way of payload, but there are a LOT of 'em. Heh.