SOME say the world will end in fire. Some say ice. Some say coordinated kamikaze attacks on the power grid by squirrels.
At least, some have been saying that to me, when they find out I've spent the summer keeping track of power outages caused by squirrels.
Power outages caused by squirrels are a new hobby of mine, a persnickety and constantly updating data set that hums along behind the rest of my life the way baseball statistics or celebrity-birthing news might for other people. It started in April, after I read about a squirrel that electrocuted itself on a power line in Tampa, Fla., cutting electricity to 700 customers and delaying statewide achievement tests at three nearby schools. I was curious, just enough to set up a Google news alert: squirrel power. But as the summer progressed, and the local news reports of power outages caused by squirrels piled up in my in-box, my interest in power outages caused by squirrels became more obsessive and profound.
I know: it's hard to accept that a single squirrel can disrupt and frustrate thousands of people at a time, switching off our electrified lives for hours. But since Memorial Day, I've cataloged reports of 50 power outages caused by squirrels in 24 states. (And these, of course, are only those power outages severe enough to make the news.) Fifteen hundred customers lost power in Mason City, Iowa; 1,500 customers in Roanoke, Va.; 5,000 customers in Clackamas County, Ore.; and 10,000 customers in Wichita, Kan. — and that was just during two particularly busy days in June. A month later, there were two separate P.O.C.B.S., as I've come to call power outages caused by squirrels, around the small town of Evergreen, Mont., on a single day.
Squirrels cut power to a regional airport in Virginia, a Veterans Affairs medical center in Tennessee, a university in Montana and a Trader Joe's in South Carolina. Five days after the Trader Joe's went down, another squirrel cut power to 7,200 customers in Rock Hill, S.C., on the opposite end of the state. Rock Hill city officials assured the public that power outages caused by squirrels were "very rare" and that the grid was "still a reliable system." Nine days later, 3,800 more South Carolinians lost power after a squirrel blew up a circuit breaker in the town of Summerville.
In Portland, Ore., squirrels got 9,200 customers on July 1; 3,140 customers on July 23; and 7,400 customers on July 26. ("I sound like a broken record," a spokesman for the utility said, briefing the press for the third time.) In Kentucky, more than 10,000 people lost power in two separate P.O.C.B.S. a few days apart. The town of Lynchburg, Va., suffered large-scale P.O.C.B.S. on two consecutive Thursdays in June. Downtown went dark. At Lynchburg's Academy of Fine Arts, patrons were left to wave their lighted iPhone screens at the art on the walls, like torch-carrying Victorian explorers groping through a tomb.
One June 9, a squirrel blacked out 2,000 customers in Kalamazoo, Mich., then 921 customers outside Kalamazoo a week later. A local politician visited the blown transformer with her children to take a look at the culprit; another witness told a reporter, "There was no fur left on it. It looked like something from 'C.S.I.' " She posted a photo of the incinerated animal to her Facebook page.
WHEN I tell people about power outages caused by squirrels — and trust me when I say that I tell people about power outages caused by squirrels quite often — I wind up hearing a lot of the same snarky jokes. People say the squirrels are staging an uprising. People say the squirrels are calculating, nut-cheeked saboteurs trying to overthrow humanity. Like the apes in "Planet of the Apes," or the Skynet computer network in "The Terminator," the squirrels represent a kind of neglected intelligence that's suddenly, sinisterly switching on.
Don't panic, I say. Squirrels have been causing power outages since long before I started cataloging power outages caused by squirrels. (In 1987, a squirrel shut down the Nasdaq for 82 minutes and another squirrel shut down the Nasdaq again in 1994 — a seminal bit of P.O.C.B.S. history that was sometimes noted in coverage of the power outage at the Nasdaq in August, which was a power outage not caused by squirrels. "This is a terrible pain in the neck," the president of one brokerage firm told The Wall Street Journal in 1994 — which, I've found, is still a typical reaction to power outages caused by squirrels.)
A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of "Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America."
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