The management of the Texas power company Austin Energy announced that approximately sixteen thousand of its customers in Austin were left without power after a snake crept into one of the substations and came into contact with electrical equipment.
According to spokesman Matt Mitchell, the outage occurred about an hour after noon, and power was restored in about an hour. “It wasn’t the network itself or the infrastructure, it was just an animal that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and caused a lot of problems for a lot of people,” he explained the cause of the outage.
At the same time, he said that shortly after the incident, the company began installing low-voltage ground fences around the substation area to prevent further reptiles from entering the property. And he added that wild animals can cause problems at power plants from time to time, but that snakes are rarely the case and the “perpetrators” are usually squirrels or other rodents.
But his words hint at the proverbial exception to the rule, as a similar situation occurred this month in the state of Virginia, where a snake caused a traffic signal failure, according to UPI. He chose an electrical cabinet as his den, where he managed to turn off the circuit breaker.
The snake refused to leave the car. They had to remove the seat for him
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