Resist The Power!

Funny story for today. I was playing a video game on the 3rd Floor when I heard a LOUD “BOOM”! Then all the power went out in the house. It sounded like explosive decompression, and I was horribly concerned that the compressor on one of our Air Conditioners had blown. Came down stairs and the Mrs. looked just as confused as I, so I ruled out the AC that she was sitting beside.

I looked outside and couldn’t see anything wrong with the world. No car accidents or crowds gathering, just a few people on their porches looking around.

The neighbors on one side of the house still had power, as their air conditioners were cranking away. I went over to the other neighbor and saw their son puttering around in the kitchen. I gave him a wave, and asked if he had power.

He had seen it all go down. It appears that a finch decided to land on the transformer and made herself into a little feathered resistor. You could see on the body where the charge had arced and blown a strip of feathers off of her and blew a sizable hole in her neck.

As you can tell by my typing the electric company showed up inside of an hour and very quickly changed the fuse on the transformer.

Was a neat little experience….well maybe not so much for the bird….

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0 Responses to Resist The Power!

  1. Thomas says:

    Willie used to keep peacocks at his golf course / recording studio. A number of years back a Peacock did that when people who had flown in to record were in session, knocking the power out for most of the day. No more peacocks at Willie’s place. Got rid of them the next day. Larry, the golf pro was in the pro shop at the time, said it made one hell of a bang. Takes a pretty serious amount of electricity to run a recording studio…Guess the peacock learned about three phases of electricity in very short order 🙂

    • Weerd Beard says:

      hehehehe. Hunter Thompson wrote several amusing stories about the peafowl he kept at Owl Ranch. Most of the stories that ended badly for the bird involved firearms and a drug addled sports writer 🙂

  2. I’ve never witnessed a bird take out a transformer but I once saw a car take out a power pole and the transformer exploding was quite impressive. No harm to the people in the car beyond the car being destroyed.

  3. Dixie says:

    Squirrels. Little bastids seem to be drawn to transformers. You’ll see ’em scooting down a power line, and you *KNOW* that you’re about to lose power.

    • Weerd Beard says:

      **Knocks on Wood** I haven’t seen it much here, but it seems all the street lines where I’ve lived have been squirrel highways, and I’ve yet to see one “Resist the Power”, but I know it happens.

      • Dixie says:

        What’s worse is that they hold out for a few seconds before they fry, so it lights up the sky for a bit. I’ve seen one take out the transformer that fed an entire subdivision– it literally lit up the overcast, and you could hear it from quite a distance.

        BRRRRRTTTTTTZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZP KA-POW

  4. Bob S. says:

    Similar story but with a squirrel victim.

    Really rainy day in North Carolina where I was stationed in the 80s. Watched a squirrel run across the power lines….from a tree toward a building — only problem, the transformer in the way.

    As he ran across the line, I had just enough time to realize what was about to happen and shut my eyes.

    Flash was still bright enough to make my eyes water. When they cleared, all I saw was the squirrel’s tail wafting down.

    Made a call to base civil engineering “Hi, would you like to know where the power outage started?”

    Thanks for bringing back a crispy memory.

    • Thomas says:

      When I lived in Michigan for a bit eons ago, had a lightning strike on the power pole/transformer out behind the house.
      I had my desk right in front of a second floor window because I liked to watch the animals out the window when I wasn’t concentrating on my college work.

      I shut my eyes as the flash began and I could STILL SEE THE BACKYARD through my eyelids.
      Was rather loud, too.

      Electricity can be impressive.

      Michigan, the state that taught me that sometimes a whistlepig might be sleeping with it’s arms wrapped around your alternator belt… 🙂

      • Weerd Beard says:

        Cool stories the both of you! Neighbor’s kid saw tweety take her last flight, I was sitting close but without a direct line of sight, and I didn’t actually see a flash.

        He says squirrels fly further!

  5. Linoge says:

    Well, as long as the bird had the nervous system to experience and (briefly) remember microseconds of events, it was probably pretty nifty for it, too.

    Right up until the whole “incineration” thing.

    One of my father’s old bases was actually brought down by a murder of crows… one dug in a little too deep into the power line, and then arced and sparked a few of his buddies. Shut down most of the grid. That was hard to explain.

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