WARREN (WWJ) – About 4,000 DTE Energy customers were left in the dark for a few hours Thursday evening in Warren, and now we know the apparent cause behind that outage:
A squirrel.
A DTE spokesperson said a squirrel had gotten caught in the power lines, causing the outage in the area bordered by I-696, 10 Mile, Schoenherr and Hoover Roads, according to a report from the Macomb Daily.
Many on social media were wondering why the power was out in the area around 6 p.m. Thursday, given there was no inclement weather that day.
DTE officials say squirrels are often the culprit for outages – even high-profile outages.
Back in 1987 a squirrel caused an outage to Nasdaq’s automated trading computer, affecting about 20 million trades.
In 2015 John C. Inglis purportedly said “frankly, the number one threat experienced to date by the U.S. electrical grid is squirrels.” He said a massive power outage caused by such a natural disaster is more likely than a cyber attack.
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