Another Weird Power Outage Cause – Wild Turkeys Away!
We’re always interested in hearing what caused a recent power outage and as we’ve written about before, the causes of power outages can be extremely varied. Many naturally associate extreme weather events with power outages, but we know that there can be other factors, including animals causing disruptions, equipment failures, issues on the grid, and of course, even planned outages to upgrade equipment.
Yesterday on April 11th, 2020, Ottawa Hydro reported an outage in the Hinchey/Ladouceur area of the city in the evening hours and that they were sending crews to investigate. About an hour later on Ottawa Hydro’s twitter account, it was reported that crews were on the scene, had investigated and found the cause.
And the cause was indeed a weird one that we’ll add to our list:
Wild Turkeys Can Fly
Some of you might remember the hilarious episode of WKRP In Cincinnati television series (Season 1, Episode 7 entitled “Turkeys Away“) when radio station manager Mr. Carlson decided to create his own thanksgiving promotion involving turkeys being dropped from a helicopter. Of course, those turkeys can’t fly and instead of being a creative promotion, it backfired and became a catastrophe as turkeys dropped from the sky causing pandemonium.
Mr. Carlson later famously said during the episode, “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
Many people actually believe that turkeys can’t fly but Mr. Carlson was partly right – wild turkeys are able to fly short distances (and roost up in trees), and even up to 55 miles per hour for short stretches. Domesticated turkeys, however, cannot fly. And of course, it was domesticated turkeys that Mr. Carlson had arranged to be dropped from the helicopter.
Flying Turkey Causes Power Outage
With that in mind, it was funny to discover that the power outage in Ottawa yesterday was caused by a flying wild turkey who happened to get caught in some power lines, according to Ottawa Hydro. We do feel sorry for the turkey, and of course for all of those that were affected by the power outage, but it goes to show that outages can be caused by many weird things you might never think about.
It might not be your “everyday” power outage cause, but whatever the reason, power outages can be more than just annoying. We’ll take this opportunity to remind you that whether it’s wild turkeys flying or a misconceived promotion of domesticated turkeys flying from the sky, AMP-TRAK Controls can help keep your power on. You can keep your turkey dinner cooking in your electric powered range even if the local utility is dealing with a strangely caused power outage.
By the way, if you’ve never seen WKRP’s “Turkey’s Away” episode, we found a youtube version of it (although the quality is not great):