Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

Even though it’s not yet officially winter in the U.S., there have been some headline-making storms recently that have caught everyone’s attention: Drenching rains on the West Coast, much-needed in light of the ongoing drought; seven feet of snow in Buffalo, NY (which no one needed); and a Nor’easter on Thanksgiving Eve, which screwed up just about everyone’s travels plans up and down the East Coast.

 And what did they all have in common? Power outages.

Yet it doesn’t always take something as powerful as the weather to plunge everyone into darkness, as students and teachers found out this week at the University of South Florida campus in Tampa.

According to officials at TECO (Tampa Electric Company), it was a squirrel that got into a local power grid and caused an outage for about 7,000 area customers and 70 percent of the USF Tampa campus.

“Sometimes those critters get around our equipment and still get themselves into trouble,” TECO spokeswoman Cherie Jacobs told the Tampa Tribune.

The squirrel reportedly infiltrated the system at a TECO substation at about 9:30 a.m. Thursday and knocked out the power, Jacobs said. TECO workers were able to get the power back after about 45 minutes. The squirrel paid the ultimate price.

The sudden outage and resulting power-down was a reminder that even on the sunniest of days, something can go wrong in an instant. That’s why it pays to have a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) connected and ready, because you never know.

Businesses across the board can be impacted by any type of outages if they fail to have the appropriate power protection in place. UPS’s and solutions like surge protection, remote power management devices and power distribution units (PDUs) can go a long way toward ensuring business systems stay functional during an outage, so that customers are not inconvenienced and revenues aren’t lost.

Winter will officially be here before you know it. Is your business ready to be plunged into the dark? If you wait until then, it may be too late.