Beaver Causes Mass Internet and Cell Service Outage in B.C., Canada

Tsing

The FPS Review
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Many residents of northwestern B.C. (British Columbia) were left without internet, landline, and cellular service for more than eight hours earlier this month on June 7, and officials have now identified the surprising cause: a single, pesky beaver.

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Although not quite the same but we had a varmint-related outage at my job about 10 years ago. A raccoon decided to climb up a power pole behind our office building and somehow(probably chewing on something) managed to fry itself on the plasma canister at the top. The resulting power surge fried one of our AC/Heating systems along a part of, ironically, the fire alarm. When we got to the building the fire alarm was ringing erratically and the whole building smelled like roadkill and various parts of it were without power. We found its mostly intact tail at the base of the pole and its toasted carcass in pieces a few feet away. The worst part was yet to come. It took a couple of weeks to get everything repaired and remaining the AC systems still had the roadkill stench. This was during the end of summer when we were still in the 80-90s. I'd rush home just to take a shower to wash that off.

On a further side note. It could've been a moose!

 
Peter_Brosdahl said:
Although not quite the same but we had a varmint-related outage at my job about 10 years ago. A raccoon decided to climb up a power pole behind our office building and somehow(probably chewing on something) managed to fry itself on the plasma canister at the top. The resulting power surge fried one of our AC/Heating systems along a part of, ironically, the fire alarm. When we got to the building the fire alarm was ringing erratically and the whole building smelled like roadkill and various parts of it were without power. We found its mostly intact tail at the base of the pole and its toasted carcass in pieces a few feet away. The worst part was yet to come. It took a couple of weeks to get everything repaired and remaining the AC systems still had the roadkill stench. This was during the end of summer when we were still in the 80-90s. I'd rush home just to take a shower to wash that off.
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Yeah at one of my datacenters racoons would get into the electrical boxes and generator shed and fry themselves chewing stuff. Frequently taking out power to the whole building and sometimes the generator wouldn't kick on bc they damaged something. Our electrical facilities staff was constantly complaining about dead critters in those.
 
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