By Dr. Robert Thorson

Two weeks ago Friday, an electrocuted eastern gray squirrel shocked UConn’s Storrs campus into submission. It blew a transformer, tripped the nearest electrical circuit and sent a power outage cascading across much of campus.

On a list provided by the administration, I counted 92 buildings that were affected. This included the UConn Dairy Bar and the president’s house. Classes were canceled. Laboratory experiments were compromised. Employees were sent home. Dorms were dimmed. Traffic backed up. Meanwhile, the repair crew from Eversource Energy (formerly Northeast Utilities) spent half a day fixing the problem.

Let’s do the math. Excluding its health center, the 2017 UConn budget is about $1.3 billion for Storrs and regional campuses. This works out to about $3.6 million per day, much of which is spent in Storrs. Making countless assumptions, my back-of-the-envelope estimate is that one clueless squirrel cost the university several hundred thousand dollars.

I chose this week’s topic to help readers recover from a presidential election so nauseating that I thought I might need a sickness bag with me in the voting booth. In theory, macabre humor about a sizzled squirrel would put electoral politics in perspective. But after researching squirrel shock, I realized that it isn’t funny at all, especially for the victims. Eversource spokesman Tom Dorsey holds these furry critters responsible for most of the state’s power outages on fair weather days.

This is actually a national problem. According to John C. Inglis, former deputy director of the National Security Agency: “The No. 1 threat experienced to date by the U.S. electrical grid is squirrels.” That quote comes from the website “Cyber Squirrel 1,” which tracks and maps animalinduced power outages. They conclude that the threat to our grid is greater from squirrels than from hackers. Earlier this year, their map was cited and headlined by The Washington Post as simultaneously “terrifying and hilarious.” Slate Magazine followed suit, headlining: “The Bane of America’s Electrical Grid Has a Bushy Tail.” Smithsonian and The Atlantic weighed in as well. In short, UConn’s recent power outage is part of growing threat to our national grid.

UConn manages power outages through its Office of Emergency Management within its Division of Public Safety. On their website they list “Power Outage” alongside “Active Threat / Active Shooter, Bomb Threat, Infectious Disease, Lockdown, Suspicious Package [and] Tornado.” Clicking down, I found specific instructions for faculty like me. They recommend that I “Develop a plan for how to respond to a power outage in the future.”

Here’s my plan: to encourage the public to look beneath the bouncing cuteness and take the squirrel threat seriously. This species (Sciurus carolinensis) is as ubiquitous as it is nosy. Driven by instinct, they nest in high places like power poles and attics. Being “scatter-hoarders,” they’re programmed to seek out the nooks and crannies of thousands of places, where they cache food for the winter. This includes electrical transformers. Being rodents, they’re programmed to chew relentlessly because their teeth grow continuously. They’re especially fond of gnawing on electrical cables. They reproduce prolifically, typically in two litters per year. To balance this increase, their mortality rate is very high, which explains why they top the charts for road kill frequency.

Yes, we love the sense of the wild that squirrels convey, even in our most settled neighborhoods. The same was initially true with wild Canada geese, whose migrating flocks marked seasonal changes. But their numbers increased, they stayed too long, and they pooped too much on sidewalks, ponds, golf courses and lawns. We mitigated this problem only after we saw them as pests. For gardeners and landscapers, squirrels are serious pests, punching thousands of holes in mulch coverings. For me, they’re still fun to watch, and I’m delighted they’re around. What I’m not delighted with is their threat to our power grid.

If can figure out how to keep squirrels out of my attic, then surely the experts at Eversource should be able to keep them out of their transformers.