A Snake Caused 10,000 Homes To Lose Power
A snake slithered where it shouldn't have been slithering, as it caused the power outage of over 10,000 homes in Koriyama City, Fukushima Prefecture of Japan.
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Snakes often find themselves getting into all kinds of crawl spaces, drains, and any number of tight openings to make their way into a more comfortable dwelling situation. Well, an unlucky slithering critter was attempting to find some shade from the heat and caused 10,000 homes to lose power in Japan. The snake in question slithered right into contact with a live wire, causing the Tohoku Electric Power station to lose power and go into a full-blown safety shutdown at 2 PM last Wednesday.
The massive power outage took place in Koriyama City, Fukushima Prefecture. When Tohoku Electric Power had finally traced the outage to the substation where the snake had been killed, investigators spoke about finding the charred remains of the reptile. It had also been reported that the smoke from the snake’s body caused so much smoke to billow out that six fire trucks had been called to douse the flames, or rather, to investigate and make sure there had not been more of a raging inferno. The safety measure that was caused by the snake’s death only took an hour to reverse. However, it affected many people and businesses, including a barber shop that could not operate without the air conditioning working.
Although the poor snake met its demise by being shocked with who knows how many volts of electricity, a ton of concerned citizens voiced their tributes to the dearly departed reptile. A flood of comments had been posted on the Japan News Today announcement of what had transpired. One concerned citizen said, “Rest in peace, snake.” That is some nice sentiment, and likely a person that had not been affected by losing their power. This is especially the wrong time for that to happen, considering Japan is also dealing with the summer heat. For those who continually run their A/C, having to be without it on a particularly hot day would be hard to deal with.
This is not the first time that a random animal had caused issues with the overall city infrastructure in Japan. Traffic lights were once disabled due to a massive amount of bird feces. Also, an excess of dog urine caused another streetlight to come crashing to the ground. We are not sure how either of those instances happened, but at least the charred snake makes a ton more sense. Maybe the ground where the dog urine was amounting had become too soft to hold up the traffic light. Either way, these are all crazy instances that have been caused by some innocent animals just being animals.
Thankfully, there are safety measures put into place, so that power stations can come back online as quickly as possible. However, that snake certainly paid the price for attempting to be just a bit more comfortable. Hopefully, no further snakes will attempt to enter an area that has clear high voltage. We are not sure if there is a snake-based network of communication, but every other snake needs to know of the dangers of attempting to find shade in a power station.
