Environmental Graffiti

Image from ddfreyne

The Albanian capital of Tirana was the center of a 72-hour power outage Friday, the latest in a series that have been plaguing the residents of the small former Soviet satellite. While most the blackouts have been related to a failing infrastructure that’s suffering age-related collapses, these most recent events have been traced back to a far more unlikely and comedic source: a cat chasing a mouse onto high-voltage cables.

Kesh Power spokespeople told the international media that they had never seen anything like this, and were indeed so shocked (my bad pun, not theirs) that they took pictures of the carnage just to be able to prove that it had happened.

Fortunately, the photography-related delays in the repair of the lines didn’t disturb too many residents of the Tirana area: most of them power their homes with gasoline generators; a step taken in deference to the multitude of failures in the power grid even before the animal population got involved.

Sources: 1, 2

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