Squirrels

The electric utilities hate 'em:

Every year, Neil Engelman carefully collects his data, stands before his company's board of directors and is asked the same question: What caused more outages? The lightning or the squirrels?

Four of the past five years, the answer has been the squirrels, says Engelman, vice president of operations for the Lincoln Electric System in Nebraska. Nebraska is not alone. Many states are grappling with a big increase in the number of power outages caused by squirrel electrocutions.

... Some states have seen a massive jump in recent years in the number of such outages. In Georgia, squirrel-related outages more than tripled from 5,273 in 2005 to 16,750 in 2006.

... Acorns from oak trees are a squirrel's main diet, says Peter Smallwood, a squirrel expert and biology professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia. When oaks produce more acorns, you get more squirrels — and more outages.

... Squirrels are not electrocuted when they run across power lines. It's when their body makes contact with both the wire and either the ground or a transformer that they become a conduit for electricity to flow through.

"That completes the circuit and bammo!" said Ed Bettinger of the Public Service Company of Oklahoma.

Among recent outages:

• A squirrel caused a power outage in October that shut down Merced College, southeast of San Francisco, for half the day.

• In January, a squirrel cut power to 4,500 customers in Amarillo, Tex.

• Hundreds of gallons of raw sewage poured into Mobile Bay in Alabama after a squirrel cut power to a sewage lift station there.