Friday, April 16, 2010

Requiem for a really unlucky squirrel

I was sitting at my computer this morning, eating a bowl of Cheerios while reading my email when BAM! suddenly there was a loud explosive noise from the backyard and my desk light went out. The UPS on the desktop computer started beeping. Oh darn, power outage.

I took a look out the back door but didn't see anything awry except for something that looked vaguely different about the transformer on the power pole behind the house which I couldn't pinpoint. I couldn't tell how many houses the outage impacted either. So, I looked up the power company outage hotline number (for the second time this month - there was a power interruption on Easter Sunday too) and reported it.

It wasn't more than 45 minutes before an electric company truck pulled up in front of my house. By then I was outside working so I walked over and told him what I had heard. He headed for the power pole on the back property line where my house feed originates. One look told him what was wrong - and what had done it. There's a type of fuse on the transformer, and it was blown. It would be a quick fix. The dangling disconnected end was what I had seen without realizing what was different. Then he pointed to the yard behind me. "Squirrel."

Yes indeed, there the poor thing lay, stiff as a board. It had evidently gotten on the top of the transformer and shorted across the poles with its body, the result being it was electrocuted immediately. Probably never knew what hit it. The power company guy said he had 10 or 12 of these happen a day. Man, it's hard being a squirrel.

1 comment:

Kathryn said...

Normally, I love wildlife, but there is a tiny, evil part of me that just sniggered reading this, probably based on the fact that the squirrel never knew what hit it, and that a good friend of mine had a long ongoing battle with a squirrel in her loft and I now regard them as crafty, determined, feisty little creatures.