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Officials in Medina County, Ohio, have solved the mystery behind a February 20th outage that knocked out phone and internet service at multiple government offices, including the county prosecutor's office.
For a while, the working theory was that contractors had accidentally sliced through underground fiber lines while doing other work nearby, but that turned out to be wrong. County Administrator Matt Springer revealed at a recent commissioner's meeting that investigators traced the true cause to a squirrel.
The animal had built a nest inside the fiber infrastructure and chewed through multiple lines in the process. Springer told the board, "It's hard to make this stuff up." He said the county is now working with internet providers and the local fiber network to prevent a repeat performance. Squirrels have a long track record of causing havoc with utility companies and have been blamed for power outages across the U.S. for years.
Source: UPI