Ten percent of power outages caused by animal and bird interference: Power officials

The issue of birds, garden lizards and squirrels causing power outages has come to light in the State after Discom officials blamed these creatures for tripping and power outages.

Hyderabad: Power outages often occur during a storm, strong winds or heavy rain causing trees to fall on electric equipment. However, when power goes off on a calm sunny day, what can be the reason? Birds, reptiles or even squirrels is what officials say.

The issue of birds, garden lizards and squirrels causing power outages has come to light in the State after Discom officials blamed these creatures for tripping and power outages. Recently Jagtial and Hyderabad’s Chaitanyapuri experienced such electricity outages, following which the power company staff attributed these outages to transformer failures caused by garden lizards and shared photos on social platform ‘X’ to validate their claims. The garden lizard story became fodder for some hilarious yet thought provoking questons from social media users, with the most prominent question being, why was this not happening earlier.

---

After multiple photographs of dead lizards, the next was that of a squirrel. According to power officials, overloading, short circuits, ground faults and old or faulty appliances were among the primary culprits behind a tripped main circuit breaker. However, there are other means through which tripping can take place, including birds and animals. The tripping happens usually due to bird or animal fault, transient fault, human intervention, insulator and hardware failure, faults among other reasons, the officials said, adding that about 10 percent of all outages were caused by animal and bird interference.

“Electricity is always looking for a path to the ground, so an animal that touches the line and another piece of equipment that is grounded would kill the animal and temporarily knock out electricity. We often see outages caused by birds, squirrels, and snakes because they unwittingly make themselves part of the circuit this way,” an official said.

The question remains that if lizards and squirrels caused only 10 per cent of the outages, what was being done about the other 90 per cent?