Mascoutah, Illinois experienced a double attack by the Animal Uprising™ earlier this month. First power was knocked out, then water. And the power outage was not the cause of the usual suspects, the suicide squirrels, this time. No, this time it was a suicide cat.
Mascoutah residents recently experienced a temporary blackout after a stray cat got into a transformer.
Power was cut to approximately 90 percent of the city about 11 p.m. June 5 when the cat was killed by the electrical surge.
"This is the first time we've had a cat (get into the transformer)," said Mascoutah Public Works Director Danny Schrempp. "We've had raccoons, squirrels, everything else."
A loud noise awoke residents living near the power plant. The city dispatched employees to the plant to attempt to fix it.
The initial outage only lasted an hour and a half, but the power failed again at about 7:30 a.m. the following morning.
"We were in the process of cleaning the substation of the remains when a gear failed while we were trying to get everything isolated," said Robert Litrell, power plant supervisor. "We switched the gear out."
But that's not all, not only was the town assaulted by an extra-crispy cat. At virtually the same instant a water main was broken. The local utility just thinks it was an old pipe, but we know what really happened, don't we? It was the alligators in the sewers. They broke that pipe intentionally. They're waiting down there for the crew that gets sent to fix it.
