This morning as I was slurping coffee and working on some research, the power kicked out. This really doesn't happen often in my neighborhood, so I was puzzled. When I called the power company to report the outage, I was informed by a recording that a large part of the city I live in was experiencing an outage and that it might be a while before the grid was back up. So I cussed and slurped my coffee faster and decided to do some reading instead.
What caused this massive power failure? One small insignificant little rodent. Yes, the ever devious gray squirrel.
They run rampant in my neighborhood. How did the little bugger pull off his evil scheme? Well, my father happens to work for the power company, and on take your daughter to work day I witnessed this happen several times as we patrolled the lines in his kicka** orange truck.
As a squirrel runs along a power line, occasionally they get lazy and instead of jumping from the wire to those big gray-green cylinders (transformers) they step. If the squirrel is touching both the power line and the transformer, their body creates an arc that blows the grid.
This got me to thinking... A squirrel can take out ¼ or more of a city's power... and a goose can take down a plane... isn't there something that can be done?
We are so technologically advanced and yet 155 people almost went down because of a freaking goose (not to mention what would have happened if the pilot hadn't been the James Bond of commercial air pilots and able to land the plane in a river with NO ENGINE POWER instead of, I don't know, crashing in the middle of the city. Someone get that guy some models and bottles). We can land a man on the moon, but a lowly furry rat can blow a transformer and take out the power in several neighborhoods. WTF??!? 
What are some little things that cause big problems you've encountered that make you wonder?
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