Raccoon's power station caper cuts electricity to 40,000 Seattle homes

[tomm2thumbs]

Source: The Guardian

Nearly 40,000 homes were without power on Wednesday morning after a raccoon broke into a substation in Seattle, Washington, and single-pawedly brought down the electric grid in a dozen suburbs. The creature caused 13 separate system outages during its brief but energetic visit.

Seattle Power and Light tweeted that “an animal entered one of our substations” in the early hours of the morning, causing a power outage that stretched across the suburbs from Golden Gardens Park to Queen Anne, north of the city. Eyewitness Jeff Pierce, who lives near the substation, told KIRO7 that he heard an explosion just before 3am, and then saw city workers and a dazed raccoon that had been shocked inside the substation. <snip>

On Twitter, some users were already calling the event the Great Seattle Raccoon Blackout of 2016.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/11/raccoon-power-station-outage-seattle-washington

[tomm2thumbs]

1. Vulnerabilities - wow

Seriously 40,000 !!!!?

High-tech meets no-tech

[GP6971]

4. Yup

it was over the news this morning

[NutmegYankee]

2. Tough penalty for his caper. Little fellow got the chair.

[JHB]

12. "Oh, what he hell, I don't got that long of a lifespan anyway."

[Nihil]

16. +1 (n/t)

[surrealAmerican]

13. They'll never find him.

He was wearing a mask.

[lastlib]

3. If he was in cahoots with the weasel, we're in major trouble!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/122846854

[jonno99]

5. I was going to ask in a smart-alecky way how the racoon fared, but the

end of the article provided the answer:

Sadly, the raccoon did not survive the experience, Seattle Power and Light confirmed on Twitter.

(as if there would be any doubt).

[mahatmakanejeeves]

17. But the second quoted paragraph says:

"a dazed raccoon that had been shocked inside the substation."

I was shocked too, in the sense that I figured the raccoon would have been electrocuted instantly rather than just shocked. I'm willing to accept that the end of the article was correct and that the raccoon was electrocuted.

[montana_hazeleyes]

6. I wonder when poor little guy will

be accused of being a suicide terrorist.

[forest444]

7. The more familiar one is with them, the less surprising these news are.

The stinky little buggers are very intelligent creatures, and hold a mean grudge against anyone who blocks access to what they consider to be their food (such as by putting a cinder block on top of your garbage can).

Anything mechanical they can access is fair game.

[rpannier]

8. Tomorrow Il Douche will be calling to ban raccoons in the USA

Except the wealthy ones

[Sam_Fields]

9. This is a god damn conspiracy!

That is what this is!

[longship]

10. Then there's the weasel and the Large Hadron Collider.

http://phys.org/news/2016-04-weasel-large-hadron-collider.html

A weasel shut down the world's most powerful particle smasher when it wandered onto a 66,000-volt transformer and caused a short circuit, Europe's physics lab CERN said Saturday.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was halted "following technical issues, including a power cut due to the passage of a weasel on a high voltage electrical transformer," CERN spokesman Arnaud Marsollier told AFP.

The collider suffered a "severe electrical perturbation" at 5:30 am (0330 GMT) Friday, CERN, the French acronym for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, said in its daily activity summary.

It said the cause was a "short circuit caused by fouine"—a beech marten, which is a member of the weasel family—on a 66-kilovolt transformer. Marsollier said that "some connections were slightly damaged and we are at work to repair" the damage caused by the weasel, which did not survive its high-voltage encounter.

The repairs "should take no longer than a few days," he said. "Not the best week for LHC!" CERN said in its summary.

More at link.

[Helen Borg]

11. Fucking ISIS terrorist raccoons!

[Paulie]

14. Another successful operation by the CyberSquirrel1 team!

Hackers got nutt'n over this elite group.

http://cybersquirrel1.com

#CyberWar4Ever

[clayton72]

15. Was he seen with a tree?

[link:|