Understanding outages

When the sky gets dark and severe weather rolls in, an outage at your home can unfortunately happen. After all, we’ve seen what happened this year when hurricane-like winds blew through our area. But what about on a clear day, especially during the fall? Why would the power go out then? Well, it could be for a number of reasons, but most of the time, it comes down to the large variety of fuzzy wildlife that call our area home.

It might be hard to believe, but here’s an interesting statistic: around 26% of Salt River Electric’s outages in 2022 involved some type of small animal. While squirrels are the most common culprit this time of year, they’re hardly the only creatures that can cause these unexpected outages—birds, snakes, and even raccoons can cause the lights to go out, too.

You’re probably wondering just how a squirrel, or a bird can cause an outage. After all, you’ve likely seen them scurrying or sitting on a power line before, completely unharmed. So how do they go from safely touching power lines to causing your power to go out? Well, it has to do with one of the basic principles of electricity. Electricity is always looking for a path to the ground, so if your neighborhood squirrel is just running across the line, he’ll be fine. But if he were to touch the line and something else at the same time, he would unwittingly complete the circuit, creating a fault that can temporarily knock out your power.

An ounce of prevention

Salt River Electric is committed to maintaining reliable service for our members, all the way to the last mile. That’s why we utilize electrical infra-structure like reclosers, which will try to automatically bring the lights back on. A recloser works by trying to close a breaker seconds after it’s been tripped. If the problem has been cleared on the line (like a nosey squirrel), and all voltage and amperage are back to normal, then the device will close, quickly restoring power.

Salt River also deploys various preventative equipment, which try and deter various forms of wildlife from venturing farther on to the line towards our equipment. These devices are de-signed to make it very hard for squirrels or any other animal to cross from one side of the line to the other.

So, the next time you’re enjoying a nice day, and your lights blink or go off for just a second, remember: it might be as simple as a critter getting a bit too curious.