How to get neighbors to talk

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ericsherman37 said:
Brutal. But which was it? Goose or swan? :wink:

We had a nasty wind storm here a couple years ago and I saw a large douglas fir branch rip off a tree and fly across the street and connect all 3 phases. I was driving up the road when it happened and got a great view of it from maybe 100 feet away. Big ol' boom.

In that same storm, a pad mounted utility transformer down the block wound up going boom because a storm drain plugged up and made a gigantic puddle (borderline pond) pretty quickly.
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It was a Swan ............My bad on the goose......
 
Cow said:
When I lived on the Oregon coast, they had a problem with Starlings. Thousands of them would land on the powerlines and cause outages. I assume it was the weight of all the birds pulling connections apart?:-?
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Whereabouts was this? Starlings are ubiquitous all across the country - I imagine they'd have this problem everywhere if that was the case. I think our most common power outage causes are winter storms, but I've heard of a couple localized seagull disasters. Their wingspan is juuuuust big enough to cross two of the HV lines.

Went to the Cascades Raptor Center in Eugene a couple weeks ago for their annual Open House... they rehabilitate injured birds of prey... the most common injury they see is a toss-up between car strikes and power line hits. The red-tailed hawks love sitting on power poles and when they take off, if there's not enough vertical air movement, they drop pretty quick and sometimes hit the lines.
 
We had a squirrel knock out power to a large data canter, UPS did their thing, generators started and the critical loads were maintained. BUT the data center manager REFUSED to believe that a squirrel could do this, even when pictures were furnished, of the fried squirrel, damaged bushings and utility repairing the issue. He wanted the utility company mangers out on site immediately so he could hear this from someone in authority.
 
brian john said:
We had a squirrel knock out power to a large data canter, UPS did their thing, generators started and the critical loads were maintained. BUT the data center manager REFUSED to believe that a squirrel could do this, even when pictures were furnished, of the fried squirrel, damaged bushings and utility repairing the issue. He wanted the utility company mangers out on site immediately so he could hear this from someone in authority.
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We had a customer (Huge facillity, four 60 MVA transformers feeding it) have 3 outages in one summer, all caused by squirrels. Of course we were called out all 3 times to get the place back up an running each time. The 3rd time the facility manager asked me if we were training "Suicide squirrels", I turned to him and said yeah, the head squirrel was our salesman of the month last month. I think he actually believed me for about 10 seconds.
 
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