Dances With Squirrels

Like many of you I was fascinated this week by all the news about the Northeast electrical blackout. Who could have imagined that one night thousands of New Yorkers would have to sleep on sidewalks?

Seriously though, the numbers in the news are staggering. According to one report, 50 million people in the US were without power at one time, along with another several millions of Canadians the report didn't count.

Let's put that into perspective: That means 1 out of every 6 Americans had no power for many hours, which makes more news than if 1 in 6 Chinese were out of power for an entire century! To put it in perspective another way, 50 million Americans being without power is just like if all of France were out of power, except that Americans care!

Let's turn our attention now to reasons why the Northeast blackout occurred. We might as well since everyone else has, and we have nothing better to do with our time.

Experts and politicians (different people) have weighed in on this subject, beginning with Prime Minister Chrétien's bold assertion that it was New York's fault. Since then the arguments have been mainly over whether it was New York's fault or Ohio's fault. There are still some people though who think it could have started in Ottawa. Ha, ha, that was a joke. We all know Canada couldn't have done it. You have to be a superpower to screw up this big.

All I know about electricity I learned using a model train transformer to fry things, and by sticking one of my fingers in a light socket. Also, my Uncle Fred was a City Light lineman. He found fried squirrels all the time in his work.

So this is my main advice for people looking for the cause of this thing: Look for extremely dead squirrels. You may have to look several hundred yards from the power lines because Uncle Fred said sometimes they go airborne.

Once dead squirrels are found, one specific question invariably arises, "Hey Mister Technology, how can roasting and orbiting a squirrel result in so much loss of power?"

Answer: I'm not Mister Technology.

Still, I'll give it a shot. The electricity in an electrical grid system the size of what we are talking about (the family size) is like a long freight train loaded with, I don't know, french fries, coming down the tracks at a relativistic velocity. It all wants to go somewhere and you aren't going to be able to tell it, "No you have to sit here and wait while I look for this poor squirrel's next of kin." It will knock you out of the way to keep going on down the tracks.

OK, that explanation went nowhere.

Let's try again. Since electricity was first discovered, when Ben Franklin rubbed his hair with his rubber kite, electricity almost never gets rubbed anymore. So when the electricity finds the squirrel it gets all happy because it thinks it finally has a "friend" it can "dance" with. Unfortunately, we all know what happens when electricity "dances" with squirrels. So the squirrel goes bye forever and ever. That makes the electricity sad so it goes all mental…

Sorry, that one was going down a dead end, too.

I'll give it one more try. It's like this. Say you've got a system where all the money that gets poured into it just goes to make a few rich people who are pretending to run it a lot richer. Then it doesn't matter what happens, every couple of decades a squirrel is going to sidetrack your system, because it's going to be one gigantic piece of junk.

That sounds about right.