Animal Causes Equipment Failure

I ran across this today, concerning a power outage:  Link

One line in particular caught my eye:
“An animal tampered with a switch which caused an equipment failure and power outage in the City Center area of Newport News.”

Not a lot of info, but it shows how easy it is to lay blame on anything that can’t answer back.  I doubt an animal actually “tampered” (implies intent) with anything.  Then, after we blame the animal, we then shift to blaming the equipment.

Once you start learning to ask the right questions, you start seeing that there are a lot of other directions this investigation could go:
– Accessibility of wildlife to critical equipment
– Fault tolerance of critical systems
– Recovery efforts