How much havoc can a squirrel cause?

[Phoenixblue]

Quite a bit actually.
read about it here - http://www.newsminer.com/view/full_...airbanks?instance=home_news_window_left_top_4

I was in the middle of this - as I work for the University of Alaska Fairbanks. My office is at an off campus location, but it knocked out power for me as well.
The squirrel fried itself on a power transformer, which then caught fire, which caused a cascade effect that bounced to the UAF Power Plant and shut down the boiler and thereby shut down the plant, which crashed the entire campus power, heat and cooling grid. And due to the this the computers were effected and thereby our e-mail and web sites. Nearly 24 hours later and we still have computer issues and no hot water on campus yet! All because of a squirrel.

Gotta love the wildlife in Alaska!

 

[dgthree]

Quite a bit actually.

I had my own experience with a suicidal squirrel here in NJ. Not quite to the extent you're describing (no fire - maybe the squirrels in AK have more volume?), but still bad. We had a squirrel fry a transformer to our office building, and the ensuing power failure took out our main computer system. We didn't have a good set of backup tapes (yes, tapes - this was a while ago), and they had to rebuild the system from scratch. This was a wallpaper company, and all our inventory was kept on the computer, so we referred to a dogeared paper printout of the last good inventory for about a month before we got our systems back, and did a lot of running back & forth to do physical checks of what was in stock. Fun times.

 

[shoes99]

I had two minor incidents with NJ squirrels and rabbits .
A squirrel chewed into my telephone lines from the pole and disrupted service. I depend on land lines, but do have a tracfone cell for travel...

A baby rabbit or its family pushed into the narrow basement window onto my laundry room. It climbed down a 6 foot shelf and then died in my Mickey laundry bag. I went to empty the bag thinking it was a roll of black socks at the bottem, no it was furry and dead..

 

[Northern_Julie]

This time of year we blame the baby ravens!!

I think wildlife is one of the interesting challenges of the in the north....we had a lynx hit by a car a few months ago...and of the cougar that was wondering around town last summer (the fuzzy kind I mean). I will never forget my first run in with a fox on the way to work and now it is just normal to see them out and about.

 

[GaSleepingBeautyFan]

We've had bees build their home in our power box and managed to short the power into our old house.

In our old house, we had a squirrel chew thru a power line that led to our house. Fried the squirrel and blew up our fuse box. We managed to find a 24 hour electrician who came out and put in a new fuse box that cost us an arm and a leg.

Turned out we didn't need to get them out so quick because we had to wait 2 days for the electric company to replace the line to the house.

I'm glad we've moved. We haven't had any issues like that with our current place.

 

[shoes99]

Today pulling into the driveway, I ran over a field mouse. He still had the acorn in his mouth. Those small critters still make me shudder. I live in a city, not in the country.

 

[doconeill]

I used to manage computer systems at a state university. Back then datacenter UPS systems were far too expensive. We had a power conditioning system, but losing power generally meant a couple hours of work for me dealing with the servers, etc.

Back then, I also took part in a multi-player online game that was actually organized into a league, and we played on the weekends against teams from other Universities, etc. Our team was spread over several local Universities.

On two consecutive weekends, while in the middle of a game, we lost power.

The first weekend, we scouted around for what had happened. There had been a loud "bang" so we thought a transformer blew. Instead, we found that down the street, one of the large "breakers" on the three main power lines and blown open. They don't usually do that of their own accord, but we did find the reason - the charred remains of a bird.

Power company came and sealed the breaker and power was restored. By then the match was over and we had lost, having lost three of our players.

The following weekend, we lost power AGAIN.

Wouldn't you know, a breaker at the same pole and blown open again...and once again, there were the charred remains of an animal - a squirrel this time (or something similar...it wasn't exactly identifiable).

Anyways, we didn't have much problem with the systems either time after power was restored. However, several weeks later our cooling system ate itself. Whereas losing one phase of power resulted in the shutdowns of the servers, the compressor in the cooling system didn't fare so well. One of the rather large fuses apparent "fused" (at least that's what the repair guy said), and instead of blowing when it should have it kept the abnormal power to the compressor, which for some reason allowed the coolant to heat to a very high temperature and become corrosive...eventually the system failed, and the temperature rose quickly and very high in the computer room before we were able to shut down the systems.

Took a week to replace the compressor (during which only about 2 servers out of the 25 very large servers we had could run), had three servers repaired, and then had a "catastrophic" disk failure a few days after that was attributed to the operating conditions before we had shut down. Catastrophic as in when the field service guy removed the HDA from the chassis (these were big and heavy drives - DEC people will remember these as RA81s and RA82s) and tilted it, you could hear pieces rattling around inside...

I never saw the final bill, as the cooling system was owned by the building, and most of the rest was under contract...but I'd say it was in 5 digits...

 

[nat1234]

Last spring we had several squirrels (yes that's more than one) trying to get into our attic. They tried by chewing on the siding of the house and then did get in by chewing a hole in the flashing around the furnace pipe. We would trap them and relocate them far, far away and we would have another one try. I think they were telling all their little squirrel buddies about our place. And up close squirrels look like rats with furry tails. We got the flashing fixed and they finally got the hint that my attic is not a squirrel hotel. Thank goodness we got them out before they chewed any wires or did any major damage.

 

[crazy4stitch]

The little rodents ate my thyme and rosemary, I didn't even bother to plant the rest.