Bird "of an unknown type" causes 10,000 residents to lose power in New Orleans
"It was not clear what happened to the bird," reports The New York Times
Take it from a recent New Orleans expat: the city’s utilities infrastructure is less reliable than anyone scheduled to return to work the day after Mardi Gras. Power outages are semi-regular occurrences in the Crescent City for a number of reasons (most of them boil down to “our electricity providers are goddamn mafioso extortionists”), but one of the frequent culprits is simply just an unfortunate, random animal that finds themselves on the wrong end of a substation’s wiring.
A few years back, a street cat tragically met its end in a similar situation—don’t worry, we held a second line funeral procession for it—and yesterday it seems a bird “of an unknown origin” appears to have knocked out power to around 10,000 New Orleanians for about three hours. According to The New York Times, an estimated 20% of all power outages in the city are caused by unlucky animals, so chalk this one up to the statistics.