Terrorist tools of the Animal Uprising™ succeeded in disrupting the gasoline supply for California, causing a sharp jump in prices. The pair of attackers, a raccoon and an opossum, unleashed their attacks on the power supplies that feed the oil refineries that serve the West Coast.
The separate incidents resulted in a 7 cent (nearly 4 pence) increase in the cost of a gallon of petrol in the west when news of the interruption to supplies broke.
On Sunday evening, an opossum managed to get into a substation operated by the power company Southern California Edison in Torrance, 20 miles south of Los Angeles, and trip the supply. It went offline around 9pm. The opossum's carcass was later found by workers at the substation.
Power was subsequently cut to Exxon Mobil Corp's nearby Torrance oil refinery, which processes around 150,000 barrels of crude oil per day, triggering a two hour delay in operations.
Just over an hour later, a raccoon upset supplies at a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power substation in Wilmington, south of Torrance, cutting power to a Shell Oil refinery for about 10 seconds, said Kim Hughes, a spokeswoman.
A dead raccoon was found in the substation, she added.
Shell began flaring – burning off excess materials it could not pump back into processing units.
Note that we here at Blue Crab Boulevard had to get this important news from a British news source. American authorities, worried about the progress the animal overlords are making, are suppressing the news here in the US. Well, either that or the wire services haven't bothered picking it up yet.
About 10 years ago, we had a pair of mating snakes fry themselves in one of the ground-situated transformer boxes, resulting in a 2 hour blackout. Fortunately, it was a warm, sunny day, so everybody spent the time outside. An early preview of the Animal Uprising®?