Throw-down squirrel strikes again

There's a power outage in parts of Santa Clara this morning. It generated an alarm call for the Fire Department, and it seems to have affected one or more of VTA's light rail stations. What's more interesting is how the electric company seems to have diagnosed it. I picked this up off my scanner.

They are going with the tried-and-true throw-down squirrel.

As the story goes, utility workers supposedly keep a dead squirrel in a cooler so when they need to explain an outage, they can just whip it out and declare the problem solved.

Note: I'm not saying they made it up. I totally believe they had a squirrel go in there and short across a breaker to the point where it needs to be replaced.

Clearly, squirrels are the real threat to our infrastructure!

Playback