Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

A power substation is no place to be if you’re not highly trained and qualified. Touch one thing that you’re not supposed to, and all sorts of havoc—or death—might result.

That was the double-edged result of an errant bird flying into a substation in Canada this week.

According to the Lac La Biche Post in Alberta, Canada, some 2,800 customers of power transmission company Altalink were left without power after a raven somehow found its way into a substation and landed on a transformer.

"The bird spread out its wings, contacted two parts of the transformer and created a flashover," said Peter Brodsky, a spokesperson for Altalink. "Unfortunately, the bird is dead, and the transformer was knocked out."

According to the Post, “the incident caused electrical blackouts throughout the Lac La Biche region at about 10:20 a.m. March 10, affecting communities from Lac La Biche to Hylo, [and] Beaver Lake to Heart Lake. According to Fortis Alberta spokesperson Jennifer MacGowan, about 2,800 customers were affected.”

And, to make matters worse, “some of the electrical load from the broken Altalink transformer was re-routed to Altalink's substation in Plamondon, but that equipment was not able to carry as heavy a load and power could not be restored to all areas,” the Post noted.

Hence, rolling blackouts had to be instituted throughout the affected areas, extending everyone’s electrical woes for hours.

The outage served to drive home the message that even something as innocuous as a bird can cause untold headaches and damages. That’s why it makes sense to always have your important equipment connected to an uninterruptible power system, or UPS. With it, when a sudden power failure hits, you have a few precious minutes to power down your gear properly, or save any critical material you’d been working on. Using power protection equipment can save residences and businesses thousands in costly damages due to outages as well as keep things running smoothly and efficiently in the event of an interruption or total outage.

Unless you’re a raven stretching its wings.