On Oct. 8, about 5,000 electric customers lost power in Grand Island.
It only took five minutes for the city’s electricians to restore it once they found the culprit: a squirrel that snuck into their main power substation.
“For a squirrel, it’d be like a playground,” said Grand Island Utility Department Distribution Manager Josh Hartley.
Hartley said it’s rare for squirrels to sneak into substations and kill the power across large areas. However, he said small, short outages that affect up to 20 customers are common.
“Usually, it's in a neighborhood where they're jumping off of trees, onto the power lines,” Hartley said.
A 2023 report from the American Public Power Association found that squirrels are the third leading cause of sustained power outages. In the Midwest, squirrels account for 19.2% of those outages. It’s the only region where squirrels are the leading cause of outages.
Last year, the Grand Island Utility Department reported 263 outages, 28% of which were caused by squirrels. Hartley noted another quarter of outages had an unknown cause, some of which could have been caused by wildlife.
While squirrels cause many outages, they are usually small and short-lived. Squirrel-caused outages only accounted for about 11% of the total outage time. Outages caused by birds (39%) and worn-out equipment (13%) both took up more of 2024’s total outage time.
Animal-related power outages are also frequent in Omaha Public Power District’s 13-county service area. Clint Zavadil, director of asset management in utility operations, said OPPD averages about 10 wildlife-related outages a month, with more occurring during the summer.
“In the summer, animals are more active, so you see more contacts with lines in the summer than you do the rest of the year,” Zavadil said. “They make up a pretty small proportion of the total number of incidents or outages that people experience.”
Most of the time, lights will only flicker, and wildlife interference causes only a couple minutes of outage time per year, he said.
When there are outages caused by animals, GIUP and OPPD said they add preventative measures. The most common method is a plastic guard that prevents animals from touching live electrical systems and shorting out a circuit.
Both Zavadil and Hartley said guards are upgraded, replaced or installed as outages happen to prevent future issues.
“It's not economical to really go out and just try to do it all at once,” Hartley said.
The guards include a plastic top on the transformer, plastic coating to protect wires and fiberglass posts that won't conduct electricity.
Hartley said preventing outages is the main goal, but wildlife safety is an added benefit.
“We're preventing the outage, but we're also not killing the squirrel,” Hartley said. “We're really concentrating on reliability, but we obviously don't want to have animals triggering things like that and getting killed.”
Another squirrel deterrent is a black band on power lines.
“It just looks like a piece of plastic wrapped around it; that is actually another form of wildlife protection,” Zavadil said. “That's to keep squirrels from being able to climb the poles.”
Hartley and Zavadil say there isn’t much power consumers can do to prevent wildlife contact with electrical utility equipment.
“I wouldn't think that there's anything that the average person can do to mitigate. It's just frequency,” Hartley said.
With squirrels being a ubiquitous Nebraska critter, power utilities and consumers will likely continue to be at the whims of these mischievous and curious creatures.