Wazzup on Lexington?

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

There's some major cop-action down at that little Lexington Ave. park (at Hancock St.) tonight. Anyone know what's up?

Comments

[ron_newman]

If it weren't so damn hot, this post would be enough motivation to hop on my bike and check it out. But not tonight, sorry....

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

The power has gone out twice over here on Clarendon Hill and I've heard sounds that sound like gunshots (but probably aren't) and fire engines.

[ron_newman]

When the power goes out, accompanied by sounds like gunshots, what you're actually hearing are electrical transformers blowing up. This used to happen regularly on my street.

[masslibrulgirl.livejournal.com]

Ah...when I heard them, I thought people were setting off fireworks because they were bored with having no power...

[talonvaki.livejournal.com]

That's near where I live.
But since I live on the 3rd floor of a triple-decker...eh, not that curious.

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

We haven't had any power outages on this block.

[nonnihil.livejournal.com]

Two long power outages overnight on Rogers, very annoying. I guess we've hit peak load season and NSTAR is discovering just which transformers they should have replaced in the spring.

(In Arlington a couple years back when we were getting almost daily outages for weeks, they always blamed them on squirrels. Maybe Somerville has an infestation of 220-volt squirrels now, too...)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

You forgot the best detail. We were getting daily power outages at 6am sharp. Squirrels wear wristwatches, dontchaknow.

[twe.livejournal.com]

Oh, that happened to me one summer too. After a week of that I got an alarm clock with a battery backup.

[chumbolly.livejournal.com]

Sincere question here: could it be that Squirrels get up with the sun which,as I've learned since having a baby, gets up at a remarkably consistent early hour? Though I guess in the summertime, it's up a fair bit before 6:00.

It actually does seem more likely to me that if an electrical transformer survived the early evening surge (which is the time of greatest power demand by, like, two-fold its 6:00 a.m. demise is the result of stirring squirrels rather than excessive power demand.

But why am I chiming in about power outages in Arlington last year? Please ignore me.

It is always the squirrels!

[lena-a-mermaid.livejournal.com]

When I lived around Elm and Porter some years ago we had power outages constantly. The outage always set off the fire alarm in our building too! (A new fire alarm was eventually installed that wasn't triggered by the electrical outages)

So EVERY TIME they would tell us it was the squirrels! I think they would blame squirrels even if there were no squirrels for miles around. Eventually after a couple years the fixed the lines around there and the frequent outages stopped. Yet, I still saw squirrels. I guess those particular squirrels lost interest in tinkering with the electrical lines.

[technoluddite.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's a demonstration of natural selection. Several years ago, there could have been a mutation that made high voltage lines particularly tasty. Over time, the individuals with a genetic predisposition to electrocution were less able to pass on their genes to future generations. So now, sparky squirrels are few and far between.