Official News page 8

REAL LIFE NEWS: CHARRED THIEF BLACKS OUT VILLAGE

by Hazed

Almost 800 people living in the Derbyshire, England village of Creswell had their power blacked out last week - and police are now looking for a "badly scorched" criminal. Yes, the cause of the blackout was some idiot taking a hacksaw to a 11,000V power line. Police found the hacksaw embedded in the cable, but no sign of the high-voltage unsub.

"The sheer stupidity of cutting through power cables should be glaringly obvious to everyone," said Phil Wilson, who is the customer operations manager with the local power company Central Networks. "At the very least putting the hacksaw through the cable would have created an almighty bang and the line would have burned for quite a few seconds, showering them with molten copper. We can only assume they left in a great hurry or they were injured and dragged away by an accomplice."

Derbyshire police said that no local hospitals had seen anybody suffering from the kinds of burns you would expect, however.

Copper thefts have been on the rise because there's been a sharp price hike recently, but it seems this kind of theft attracts the more stupid criminals. This guy should consider himself lucky: he could have been killed, which would definitely have put him in the running for a Darwin Award.

And Another Power Outage Culprit

When looking for the cause of a power outage in Yarmouth, Mass a few weeks ago, the culprit was found to be none other than Sponge Bob Squarepants.

Police and utility officials say a metallic balloon bearing a picture of the cartoon character drifted into some electric wires, tripping breakers and cutting power to about 4,000 residents.

Cartoon characters - whatever next! I guess it makes a change from squirrels gnawing through wires.

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