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.