Ninja Squirrels

There is an interesting (but brief) article over at SCADAMag.Infracritical.com that notes that squirrels are the number three cause of power outages in the United States. It also provides a list of the top ten outages, sourced from American Public Power Association. Nary a mention of cyberattacks, though the number four listing of ‘unknown’ does provide some pause for thought. The lack of cyber should not be surprising, even given the numerous stories about the presence of Chinese malware in the grid infrastructure; Chinese (or Iranians, or North Koreans, or whomever) actually shutting down the grid would have people calling for nuke strikes.

Two pieces of information are, however, missing from the discussion, the number of people affected by each shutdown, and the time to recover from the shutdowns; both are important measures of 'attack' impact. I suspect that the rankings on the list would be significantly different for either of those demographics, with ‘storms’ and ‘weather’ nearer the tip-top of the lists.

In any case, this just goes to prove how important the often unsung work of electrical system employees, particularly line crews, is to our society. The next time you see a line crew truck drive by, give them a salute, they deserve the recognition.