HN exposed me to http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/opinion/sunday/squirrel-po... , which has the best paragraph about squirrels ever:

Matthew Olearczyk, a program manager with the Electric Power Research Institute, explains that typically a squirrel will cause a blackout by scampering across electrical equipment and touching simultaneously both an energized component, like one of the cylindrical transformers at the top of a utility pole, and a grounded piece of equipment. The squirrel completes the circuit, generating an arc. There is an instantaneous flash of blue light. At its center is the squirrel, combusting.

I'm confused as to why this hasn't been incorporated into designs for electrical utilities, squirrel length is pretty easy to figure out and then just never design components that could be shorted via that reach.

Squirrels are considered a strategic threat to the US infrastructure according to some governmental agencies. They're amazingly effective at knocking out power lines, albeit to the detriment of the squirrel who undertakes these apparent suicide missions.

Used to happen at our house all the time (once every 6-12 months), we had lots of trees near power lines. There'd be a bang, a blue flash of light, a dead squirrel, and no power (or a power dip).

We had the entire power to our building knocked out by a squirrel, one of the admins got a picture of it fried on the ground after it fell. Took the power company about 4 hours get power back to the building, one would think it would be a little more difficult to knock out power.

totally off topic, but we have a pear tree in the back yard by a fence and the squirrels will take bites out of the pears before they are ripe and knock them on the ground. In over a decade we have not gotten a single pear off the tree. My wife hates them and will yell at them, she has delcared war on them (but she is losing). So they are efficient at being pests.

If you're open to culling their population, a large bucket filled with water, with bird seed floating on top, is very good at drowning squirrels.

As a kid I was enlisted by my parents to kill squirrels living off our fruit trees, with a >1000 foot-per-second air rifle.

The sibling comment about a large water bucket and seeds sounds like a good idea, wish we had thought of it back then. The shooting of squirels was always a source of friction with the neighbors, greased yearly with free sacks of the tastiest peaches and pears ever.

While we don't have squirrels in Australia, we're not immune to this problem either! Cockatoos, a native parrot, love chewing up our fibre lines.

https://www.nbnco.com.au/blog/the-nbn-project/a-uniquely-aus...

I have a cockatiel (small cousin to the cockatoo) at home. The first thing I thought when I saw "Australia" was "oh god, cockatoos." Mine regularly severs USB and headphone cables with ease then spends hours stripping all the insulation off preventing any hope of repair. I can only imagine what the Australian flying bolt cutters could do.

Edit: to anyone contemplating a parrot who owns a laptop, you will come back into the room to find it completely stripped of all its keys. Parrots just really love forcibly disassembling things.

all wires should be buried. not only squirrels and other critters, but hurricanes and other acts of nature cause major problems. i know that most cities have started doing this for aesthetics than anything.

It's really expensive, time consuming, and those wires are still susceptible to backhoes.

I think the joke goes:

What three things would you bring with you if you were stuck on a deserted island?

A length of fiber, a shovel, and a margarita.

Bury the fiber and drink the margarita while briefly waiting for a backhoe to come dig up the fiber.

It's not just the upfront cost either, but once you bury the cables all future cable upgrades and replacements will be more expensive too.

Burying cables nevertheless makes sense in some places, particularly dense areas. For areas with low population density (most of the land mass of the US for instance) it's totally cost prohibitive.

Backhoes cause damage in a small area, and generally it should be possible to notify the cable owner and for them to get a repair crew dispatched quickly.

A big storm can take out overhead cables in hundreds of places in a short time. It can take a day or more to even find all the damage, and you can have a lot more places that need repair than you have repair crews, so it can take days for some places to even get a repair crew on site.

Also, a storm that takes out overhead fiber or other telecom cables often also takes out power. I believe that in many areas the services that own non-power cables that share poles with power cables are not allows to touch anything on the pole until the power company restores power. That can further slow down scheduling telecom repairs.

You need to make sure backhoes know where the cables are. It works very well in Netherland. Except for high voltage long distance power, everything goes underground.

Although in urban areas, I'd expect it to make more sense to have spacious tubes underground through which all the cables are easily pulled, so you don't have to dig everything up all the time. Maybe they already do that; I'm not sure.

Does the Netherlands have a system for mandatory conduit sharing?

I honestly have no idea. We might. There's very likely to be tons of regulation around it to make everything as safe and practical as possible for everybody.

You must already have conduit underground. You aren’t running water and sewerage on elevated lines are you, unless you’re very rural.

you are a moron if you are digging and haven't got the proper permits and surveys done. yes... accidents do happen but can mostly be avoided. but, i guarantee that someone digging up a line with a backhoe happens ALOT less frequent then some idiot in a car taking out a phone-pole.

>i guarantee that someone digging up a line with a backhoe happens ALOT less frequent then some idiot in a car taking out a phone-pole.

yeah, but can you guarantee that the repair costs total of the more frequently repaired option is greater than the repair costs total of the less frequently repaired option?

repair frequency is only a single metric -- what if the frequency was low but the cost to repair was 20x?

Florida prefers to upgrade the poles to ones that hurricanes can't bother. Concrete is popular, with some poles being 2 feet thick. Ductile iron is becoming popular.

Buried stuff is hard to fix and is at risk of flooding.

High voltage cables still make more sense overground, because of higher costs and because they hardly fail.

But they can ruin the beauty of our natural landscapes.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/15/national-gri...

You need to keep the soil on top of underground cables free from trees and deep-rooting bushes, so it’s not necessarily better looking.

I know distribution lines are routinely buried, but can transmission lines be buried?

It doesn’t work too well unless you’re doing HVDC.

But when they do, it's usually because of storms, trees, and...squirrels.

Until they do and burn down towns in Northern California...

there are tradeoffs. digging holes and trenches is expensive.

See the part about gophers

My dog tries to tell me this everyday.

> anybody that has ever put out a bird feeder knows how persistent squirrels can be

Bribery is effective. Put out a separate feeder with something squirrels like [1], make it easier to reach than your bird feeders, and keep it stocked. The squirrels will feed there and leave the other feeders alone.

[1] https://www.perkypet.com/articles/what-to-feed-squirrels

I haven't had to try it yet (no squirrels raiding my feeder in the area), but supposedly spraying hot pepper juice on bird seed should keep the squirrels away while still letting the birds eat the seed. Birds are immune to the effects of capsicum because it doesn't attach to their pain receptors.

https://www.maddog357.com/chili-pepper-birdseed-yes-thing/

99% Invisible did a great episode on squirrels, covering their history in major American cities (they were introduced, not native) and the havoc the wreak on our infrastructure

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/uptown-squirrel/

The Eastern Gray squirrel is native in eastern and midwestern North America, but it lives in forests, and we cut those down to make room for cities. So bringing some in to live in the parks and other trees of those cities seems more like re-introducing a native species than introducing a non-native species.

They were later also brought in to cities in other parts of North America, and there it was introducing a non-native species. Worse, in many of those areas there were species of native squirrels living outside the cities. After the Eastern Gray's were brought to the cities, they often spread to the forests outside the cities, and took over the habitat of the native squirrels.

Here in the state of Washington, there is only one small area known to still have a native Western Gray squirrel population. The Eastern Grays, introduced a little under 100 years ago, have taken their place everywhere else.

I have no idea why whoever wanted squirrels in Seattle decided to bring Eastern Grays from across the country, instead of simply going and trapping a few of the then abundant native Western Grays outside the city, and using those.

Also for ham radio antennas. I hate them.

They're adorable, I forgive them.

Now waiting for the news item, 'Little old homeless lady disconnects internet with squirrel army.'

It's already begun: https://cybersquirrel1.com/

Although the squirrels seem to be taking it upon themselves...

That is genius, but I note it doesn't disprove my 'little old lady who lives in park' theory, it may just be mapping the extents of it.

Someday our era may be known to history as "just before the Caddyshack Apocalypse."

Could you make cable that is very untasty for squirrels, but environment-friendly otherwise?

Probably. Part of the problem is that many modern electrical insulation materials--in an effort to be eco-friendly--are made of soy derivatives. When such materials are used for wires in car engines, as they frequently are in Japanese cars, rats consider them dinner. I live in a rural area, and I've spent many $K on this problem.

Whether there's an equally "natural" material that rodents don't like is a question that should be researched.

They could put capsaicin in the insulation, if they cared.

That wouldn't help against Australian parrots but rodents are the clearly bigger problem, most places.

Parrots are immune to the pain effects of capsaicin because it doesn't attach to their receptors and many actually love eating hot peppers.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_did_birds_adapt_to_eat...

https://www.maddog357.com/parrots-peppers-no-sweat/

https://www.parrots.org/ask-an-expert/are-hot-peppers-good-f...

It is likely that the different perceptual capacities of mammals and birds is the actual reason why peppers produce capsaicin. They "want" their fruit eaten by birds, who will scatter the seeds widely, not by mammals who will not.

Probably that would require assembly workers to wear gloves. But perhaps they already do.

licorice data lines?

Why is it not practical to impregnate the cable sheaths with something foul-tasting?

cybersquirrel1.com strikes again!

Aerial things are the number one culprit for man-made damage to squirrels.

Networking programming errors should be called squirrels instead of bugs.

Politicians and greedy monopolistic companies are the number one culprit for aerial fiber in the first place, so...

Other greedy companies are planning to loft thousands of satellites to compete with the aerial fibers and, better, co-ax cable.

More power to them, astronomy notwithstanding.

... Do you not want Internet? It seems like you don't want the internet.