WSJ on squirrels zapping out electric power lines.
February 4, 2003
Fried Squirrel Fails to Find Favor With Public Utilities
It's a War and the Squirrels Are Winning As Electrocuted Critters Cause Power Outages
By BARBARA CARTON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Robin Folcik was reading the newspaper at her breakfast table one Sunday last August when the lights blinked, smoke poured from the sockets, and a charged buzz came over the room, making the hair on her arms stand up.
"I thought my house was blowing up," recalls Ms. Folcik, a waitress in Southington, Conn.
An inquiry into the matter by Connecticut Light & Power found "remnants of a squirrel" and shards of a ceramic electrical switch at the base of utility pole #85324. The conclusion: The critter had electrocuted itself and, in so doing, triggered a massive power surge that blew out appliances and television sets all over the neighborhood.
Like many other utilities around the country, Connecticut Power says it's having trouble these days with squirrels causing outages, damage and outraged customers. Utilities in recent years have stepped up efforts to fight the acrobatic rodents -- buying everything from predator urine to baffles that look like pizza pans to fend them off.
[Cover of Comic Warning of Dangers of Squirrels]
A Celina Utilities comic book raises public awareness about the dangers squirrels pose to public power.
It's a war and the squirrels are winning. It's escalating as the electrical grid spreads and more wires are closer to more animals whose natural habitat has been destroyed. About a thousand miles of high-voltage transmission lines are added each year in the U.S.
At Pepco Holdings Inc., a 1.8-million-customer utility in Washington, D.C., squirrel-related outages rose to 999 last year from 702 in 2001. Pepco is busy installing $5 insulators -- they look like Coke cans -- around live wires that feed into overhead transformers. The insulators are meant to keep the animals from perching atop grounded transformer tanks, then unwittingly touching a live wire -- in which case it's lights out, both for Pepco customers and bushytail.
Pepco views its efforts as merely "a holding action," according to spokesman Robert Dobkin, because "there's nothing squirrels can't get by."
Longmont Power & Communications, which serves 35,000 customers north of Denver, says that more than 90% of its significant outages are caused by squirrels, which cut the power 393 times in 2002, up from 349 two years earlier. The increase took place despite measures Longmont has taken to thwart squirrels by banding utility poles with slippery, hard plastic.
In the past two years, the municipal electricity system in Tullahoma, Tenn., spent more than $25,000 on "Varmint Shields" -- dark-gray plastic disks that look like barbecue grills -- so squirrels can't cause trouble at various hot spots, including transformers. But the utility considers the effort a "limited" success, given that it has reduced squirrel outages to 136 in 2002, from the 148 it reported in 1997.
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Last year, the Tullahoma utility proposed that a trade association of Tennessee Valley Authority utilities do a study called "Why Squirrels Eat Aluminum Connectors." The TVA nixed that, citing plenty of existing industry reports considering possible preventative steps. One mulled whether painting utility poles red might ward away the animals and concluded that it wouldn't.
What customers don't understand, say exasperated utility workers, is that the cute little forager is an obsessive foe. A squirrel's teeth grow six to 10 inches a year, unless the rodent has plenty to gnaw on. And as everybody knows, squirrels are agile, and they can jump.
Squirrels follow paths that they have taken before on their way home or to an acorn stash, and have an internal navigation system for following a route over and over, using remembered objects to plot a fix with singular determination. "A squirrel thinks, 'This is the way I've gone all my life, and just because you built a substation, don't think for one minute I'm not going to go there,' " says Sheila Frazier, who advises utilities as a senior project manager for Energy Consulting Group LLC of Marietta, Ga.
Darrell Floyd, a transmission specialist for Southern Corp.'s Georgia Power, once tried staking fake owls on a few substations to scare squirrels off. He says when utility crews revisited one of the sites a week later, they found a squirrel perched happily on an owl's head.
Falling trees and branches obviously cause plenty of outages, too, but dealing with squirrels is "so aggravating" to utilities, Ms. Frazier says. "You've got to drive forever to some place, replace the transformer -- and the worst problem is you know in your heart it's a squirrel, but you don't often have a fried carcass to show anybody because predators have already snatched it, and customers are crying bloody murder."
Linemen are so fed up with the animals, they "even yell at me when I slow down to let a squirrel go across the road," says David Schmidt, a manager at Celina Utilities, a municipal power system in Celina, Ohio.
Many utilities say trapping squirrels is too expensive. Shooting them is costly and in many places restricted. Immigration will quickly repopulate an area where squirrel numbers have been reduced drastically.
Thus the development of anti-squirrel gear is surging. In one report on outages, the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit analysis group in California, called the squirrel "Public Enemy No. 1.
Entrepreneur Douglas Wulff, of Columbia, Mo., hopes for a hit with his $50 "Critter Pole Guard." Introduced last year, it looks like a string of polypropylene bratwurst that wraps around a utility pole. When a squirrel tries to clamber over it, the bratwurst spins and tosses the animal off.
"Squirrels are us," says fence maker Fred Smith, who claims sales of his electrified substation barrier have climbed to $1.4 million since he introduced it four years ago. In Chicago, Joe Seid, sales manager at Bird-X, Inc., is pushing products such as the $95 Transonic IXL. Based, he says, on "psycho acoustic jamming" principles, it blasts "high intensity" sound waves that can't be heard by humans but sound like jackhammers to squirrels.
Among other things, Connecticut Light is trying vented bottles of fox urine hung every 10 to 12 feet along substation fencing. A quart sells for $37.99 from Predatorpee.com, in Bangor, Maine. But the pungent vials didn't help avert last summer's power surge, which the utility is still trying to clear up.
More than 100 customers have sought damages for ruined appliances, and many have already received compensation, including Ms. Folcik, who protested that she lost two TV sets, a Sony PlayStation, two video-recorders, an air conditioner, a stereo and speakers, and a treadmill.
Customers want the utility to spend more on maintenance, and have taken their case to the state's Department of Public Utility Control. The utility claims that a squirrel was responsible, and no device on the market could have prevented what happened. But some angry customers don't buy that story and have suggested instead that "perhaps C & P maintenance crews were responsible," DPUC records say.
"I thought, 'A squirrel? Oh yeah? Again?' " says Ms. Folcik. "It has happened before, and they always blame it on a squirrel."
Write to Barbara Carton at barbara.carton@wsj.com
Updated February 4, 2003
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