Beaver's Illegal Streaming

The town of Tumbler Ridge in the remote north of Canada ....

Internet Theft Was Big In The Beaver World

 

..... suffered a sudden loss of its TV and Internet services on the 24th of April 2021.

With some 900 internet users and 60 TV customers affected the provider Telus, sent technicians out to seek the cause of the problem. They followed the cable path from the town until they came across some orange cable tape that had been used to secure the cables, as they passed near a beaver dam.

Further investigation showed that natures enterprising little civil engineers, had dug down more than a metre, to where the cable had been buried to avoid frost damage .... they had then chewed through the protective conduit and tape, and then the cables in several places. Several parts of the underground cabling, were found in the beavers' home.

A major job of relaying cables was under taken to restore services, and Telus said it had managed to fully restore the service to Tumbler Ridge, which has a total population of just 2,000, by 15:30 on Sunday.

A Telus spokeswoman Liz Sauvé described it as a "very unusual and uniquely Canadian turn of events". But she was wrong ... change the animals, and you can find many examples of animals disrupting human services. 

Australia for example has a major problem with cables chewed and frayed with the culprits discovered to be cockatoos (a type of parrot).

Knoxville Power Plant Explosion

In both Germany and the USA, Racoon's can cause power supply problems .... one took out power in Seattle for a few hours, frying itself in the process. While another did something similar in Colorado Springs. While in April 2018, a raccoon blew a transformer at a Knoxville power plant causing forty three thousand people to lose power in the city. Knoxville Utilities Board (KUB) had a video of the moment the power was knocked out. The KUB believe that wildlife is the cause of about nine per cent of the areas power outages.

In Japan, a rat (or something similar), electrocuted itself at the destroyed Fukushima nuclear facility, near a temporary switchboard, used to supply power to cooling systems at three fuel pools in the facility. While in Shiojiri and Matsumoto, the traffic light system broke down, after after a build-up of pigeon droppings (reported as around three feet of excrement,) had been allowed to pile upon an electricity substation's insulator, short-circuiting street signals. Some 25,000 traffic lights and hundreds of homes reportedly lost power.

Monkey Knock-out Blow

In Kenya, a Vervet monkey knocked out power across the entire country, when it fell on a transformer at the Gitaru hydroelectric power station tripping the transformer, resulting in the loss of 180 megawatts of power, and triggering a blackout wave across Kenya. Power was restored almost four hours later, and the monkey apparently survived its accident.

Electrocuted Marten

The Large Hadron Collider was brought to a standstill, when weasel or marten chewed through a power cable, frying itself but incapacitating the expensive collider for a period of time.

Finally in this brief round up of animal power outages .... a chicken. Yep, the harmless chicken! Somehow a live one got lose at Maui Airport, in Hawaii, and got into a Maui Electric Co. transformer in the rental car area at Kahului Airport. The chicken caused a power outage that left some passengers having to disembark their planes by mobile stairway.

Really, I could have listed at lot, more examples .... I only looked for a few between 2015 and 2018 but there were many more. Basically, wherever wildlife exists, animal outages occur.