Better Find a "Throw Down Buzzard"

I was awakened at 0645 this morning by a loud boom followed immediately with a total loss of electricity.
Entergy, the local power company,  was on the scene within 45 minutes and had the power back.  As I watched the Electrical Journeyman replace the blown breaker, I noticed he knocked something off the transformer.  Upon further review it was the critter in the photo that caused the short and he paid dearly for his unfortunate wandering. 

Notice the black tail that was burned

The incident brought back memories of my DuPont days when you conducted "Root Cause Failure Analysis"  to learn of causes and prevent future failures.  We have investigated power outages of many causes.  Snakes have been culprits before, but usually in substations where electrical leads are crossed on floor surfaces, not fifty feet in the air.  One similar incident occurred when a mother raccoon gave birth to three babies on the top of a substation.  One of the cute, cuddly critters fell into the "Hot" part of the apparatus and shut down half of the entire plant.  The two surviving siblings were rescued and later released into the wild. 

Anytime an electrical outage occurred, you immediately begin looking for some sort of cause.  Lightning was often the reason, but not always.  Some causes were difficult to identify such as failing lightning arrestors that seem to fail only on coastal locations after twenty years of service or dirty insulators that were a result of extended droughts and not getting rinsed with normal rainfall. 

Birds were a common suspect.  You would find a charred spot on a pole or cross arm and a dead bird nearby.  This was always a preferred "root cause" as it was considered more of an "Act of God" and did not require elaborate investigations and expensive fixes to prevent recurrence. Sometimes it was necessary to ask for help from the experts.  One such expert was a company consultant, Ed Wharton.

Ed was a very intelligent Electrical Engineer that was eager to help and always provided practical analysis and solutions.

It was on one such incident that my Power Distribution supervisor, Paul Pool, had called Ed to help with an investigation of an outage that caused significant production loss.  After numerous time in the field, studying systems, prints and computer reviews, they were not coming up with any possible causes.  With tongue in cheek,  Ed turned to Paul and said,  "You need to get a 'throw down buzzard'"! 

Considering the state of current affairs where too many people don't take responsibility for their actions, it is time for our current leader to set the example. put away his "Throw down buzzard" and take responsibility for his actions and quit blaming others.