What Could Have Caused SEMO's Power Outrage?

While reports are sketchy, I have a hunch as to the cause of the blackout.

I bet it was a damn space heater.

Most people think nothing about plugging in one of these appliances. You get chilled. You turn on a handy space heater and the chill goes away. Problem solved.

But I've dealt with the unintended affects of space heaters throughout my career working in Information Technology. The pesky little appliances pull a lot of amps and can trip a breaker in a second. Tripped breakers shut down everything that is plugged into that particular electric circuit including computers. And when a computer doesn't start up, guess who gets the panicky call to fix the "broken" PC? The folks from I.T., that's who.

Nope, I bet the outage was caused by a space heater.

You know, on second thought, I have also tripped a breaker at home using a crock-pot and a microwave at the same time. I suppose that could have caused the problem. Especially when you consider the size of some of the crockpots they make these days. You could slow cook half a cow in some of them.

And since the Redhawks were playing at Houck Stadium on Saturday afternoon, I think it's a safe bet that the tailgaters parked in the end zone had several crockpots heating up game-day delicacies like those little barbequed weenies and various forms of nacho dip. Perhaps, it was actually those weenie-heaters that caused the campus-wide blackout.

But then while working outside on Sunday, I couldn't help but notice four squirrels insanely chasing one another around my backyard. They were getting into all sorts of mischief including climbing our two birdfeeders. They're both supposed to be "squirrel resistant" feeders, but the one dangles off a hook and the squirrels have figured out if they ride the top of it like some kind of a rodent-sized teeter-totter that they can shake out a lot of the feed.

My point is that squirrels get into trouble quite easily. It's not uncommon to hear about some squirrel trying to bury a nut in the middle of a transformer only to fry itself and the utility equipment at the same time.

So maybe a squirrel was responsible for this outage at Southeast.

But then I got to thinking about it. This was a HUGE outage. It took out the entire main campus of the University containing dozens of buildings and housing a couple thousand students for over 36 hours.

Could a lone squirrel possibly have done that much damage? I don't even think a team of squirrels could have pulled off that feat.

But what if there was a "perfect storm," where several small events happened simultaneously combining to create a single colossal calamity?

Say, for instance, a squirrel using a crockpot and a space heater at the same time.