Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

It was January 2009 when a US Airways flight leaving New York’s LaGuardia airport struck a flock of Canada Geese and ended up ditching in the Hudson River. Miraculously, everyone survived. Except the geese.

More recently, some birds were again the cause of havoc, this time in Alaska and this time on a more local level.

Officials with the Ketchikan Public Utilities Electric Division say two “bird strikes” on a power line on the Ketchikan Peninsula in nearly the same area caused widespread outages and equipment shutdowns. KPU Manager Andy Donato told KRDB radio that his crews found the bird that caused the Saturday morning power outage. They hadn’t yet found a body for Wednesday’s, but “we do have some first-hand information that there was a large bang in the area of Herring Cove, so we suspect that there’s a bird there. We’ll just have to do a little closer looking.”

These recent bird hits drove home the point that businesses and homeowners need to be ready for a sudden loss of power, even by something as innocuous as a bird. If a sudden power failure can lead to such a widespread outage, just imagine the impact it might have on your organization. It also begs the question: why take that kind of risk when there are solutions available that can prevent outages and the related fallout they incur? Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) offer security and protection for all types of power issues, no matter what the location or scale of the system. With a proper system of battery backup solutions in place, an organization may feel secure that systems will function normally in the event of an outage.

KPU’s Donato, who’s seen this before, said it is possible for a bird to survive a power line strike, but usually if you hear a bang, the bird has been killed. He says there have been other bird strikes in the past in that same area.

“I don’t know why we’re frying the birds, but this past weekend, Saturday, it was a seagull,” he said. “Prior to that it was a goose, and we retrieved the goose. Now why is a goose getting in the lines? I don’t know,” he said.