ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Critter Stories

You folks should really come on down to Southwest Florida. We got critters.
A few years ago there was an old lady who kept complaining about a monster under her house. Small pets were dissapearing and stuff. Long story short a half dozen firemen and sheriff deputies finally wrestled a 22 foot boa constrictor out of her crawl space.
We have a plague of Nile Monitors across the river in Cape Coral. These are 6 foot lizards that are a lot more aggreessive than alligators ... but we have plenty of them too. My wife had a run in with a little 3' nile monitor in one of her new homes. She ran him off with a broom.
Possums and raccoons seem to like living behind the tub skirts so that is something they have to check before they close up the house but she has kicked up a wild hog doing it.

Ya'll have some great stories. My own are all encounters with small animals:

Working on an AC condenser I had an extension cord run along the side of the house. Out of the corner of my eye I see my cord sliding away. I look over and that's when I realise it's a copperhead snake.

While working in a low basement I felt something in my hair and, thinking it was just some cobwebs, casually brushed it out. And watched as a black widow fell down the front of my shirt.

Had a very unpleasant experience working on some j-boxes that had been covered up by a dropped drywall ceiling. I could get into the 24" space between the dropped ceiling and the original ceiling through the plumbing access in the bathroom. Only after I squeezed down there did I see all the home-owners's house cats which were using the space to hide from me, and apparently also as litter-box: There were mounds of cat-poop maybe a foot in diameter and several inches high.

A funny one I was present for was fishing wire into an attic for a light switch. My buddy is in the attic getting ready to drill the top-plate, and I'm on the floor below him. Suddenly I hear him scream "SQUIRREL!" and then his leg is sticking through a hole in the plaster ceiling. Apparently it spooked him a little when it popped out of the insulation.

-John

Gfretwell, I grew up at Whiskey Creek, at Wyomi Drive on the south side. One time we watched a panther in the empty lot on the other side of the canal from us. This was way back before Harbor Cay, or Summerlin road was built. It was woods all the way to Estero.

The state used a panther to justify buying a huge chunk of land along the Estero river where I live (west end of Broadway). We used to see him now and then. Eventually it got hit by a cop car over near RSW and they moved him to Fakahachee Strand. I volunteer with DEP watching over that patch so I see lots of critters but they are in their natural habitat, not like the stories here.

You probably would not recognize Estero, or most of Lee County. They are permitting about 1100-1500 new houses a month. All those critters have to go somewhere.
That picture of the alligator standing up in front of a door that is bouncing around the net was supposed to have been taken by a homeowner on Winkler south of Summerlin. I am still trying to verify it but I do know ther first time I saw it was a Xerox copy of a snap shot.

Panthers?! Alligators?! Giant Lizards?! Rattlesnakes?! Geez, what next, hordes of Velocoraptors? The most dangerous beasts round here are pine-martens, (wild ferrets). The only poisonous snake in the north of France is the adder, which can kill very rarely if you're sensitive or a child. ( The common snake is the grass-snake, totally harmless but often killed by the ignorant; the adder is marked vividly with warning vees). We have buzzards, but they only take rabbits and voles. My favorite beastie is the common house-sparrow, the little piaf. Summer wouldn't be summer without those little rascals squabbling and chattering on (and in) the roof of the workshop, or having a communal dustbath out in the yard!
Alan

If you ever really looked a great blue heron in the eye and watched him hit a pinfish swimming in ankle deep water you have no problem believing the velocoraptor is a bird's great grandpappy.
We really don't have that many poisonous snakes. The most common around my house is the black racer. I go get them out of people's screen rooms all the time. You can just grab them since they don't really have much in the way of teeth. I usually give them a finger to bite and grab them with the other hand.

Those down under folks can scare me with snake stories. They have the nasty ones.

We have lots of black widow spiders here - some are pretty good size too. We leave them alone and they avoid us! A big problem here are hornet and wasp nests in attics - we always have a can of hornet and wasp blaster in the van.

Working in an old apartment building that had a 60 amp fused disconnect feeding a sub-panel. Someone had punched open the knockout from the back above the line terminals, and there was a hole in the wall directly behind it. Laying between the two terminals was the skeleton of a mouse which was electrocuted and had been there for many years.

About 10 years ago, Stanford Univerity had a major outage that was caused by a rat chewing thru a 12kv cable.

The university is fed by dual 60kv feeders from 2 different PG&E substations, feeding 2 60kv->12kv transformers, and a 60kv->4kv transformer. Either feeder can handle the entire campus load.

There is also a cogeneration facility on campus, which can handle most of the load for the core campus and medical center.

Unfortunately, the rat chewed up the 12kv intertie between the substation and the cogen facility, and there was no way to isolate it, so most of the campus was shut down for about 12 hours.

The entire campus went down at once, but they were able to restore power to the older 4kv system by feeding it directly via the 60kv->4kv transformer, but because the 12kv intertie was down, the entire 12kv distribution was shut down until repairs were made.

They subsequently installed some additional switches to allow the 12kv intertie to be isolated, and they might have installed a second parallel intertie as well.

There was a lot of fallout from this incident, as the outage took down the datacenter, with the mainframe computer that was used for hospital patient care records, as well as the mainframe used for campus business services, and the mainframe used for the research libraries group.

In addition, the datacenter housed the NSFnet router feeding most of the internet in the greater bay area at the time, as well as the BARRnet routers feeding other internet sites in the bay area. This was before the commercial internet existed as we know it oday, so during the outage, most of the bay area was offline, with the exception of a few sites that were connected to other networks.

The good thing is that the emergency power systems at the campus radio station where I was working at the time all functioned properly, and there was no interruption of service.

As a side note, during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, we were one of the only radio stations in the bay area that never went off the air, since we were relatively low power (500 watts), and our transmitter was backed by a UPS and a generator.
The studios were backed by a inverter fed from a battery bank that also fed the station PBX, as well as a generator. We also had a portable generator that could be connected to feed limited lighting and the battery chargers, as well as the inverter fed emergency power system that fed the studio electronics.

Ahhh.....animal related outages.
Snakes do us the most damage. They get in our substations and trip out the whole thing. A couple of years ago, the snake got up on the main transformer, and the resulting arc took out two low side bushings, two high side bushings, and an arrester. Total bill....$20,000!

One of my "favorites" was the snake that took out a distribution feeder one day. When we found it, it was still hanging in the stucture in such a way that it was virtually impossible to pull it out with causing another outage. So we left it until we could figure out what to do. The buzzard that flew in to get the snake (taking out the entire substation) figured it out for us!

Another one is a local hospital here which lost power. The power company couldn't find why the mains tripped until one of their linesmen found a fried squirrel hanging in a tree across the street.