Throwback Thursday: Looking back at when a monkey caused a blackout in the entire country of Kenya
Here’s the crazy story of when a mischievous monkey caused a nationwide blackout in Kenya.
In a moment that sounds more like a return to The Ricky Gervais Show than a real-world crisis, a single monkey once plunged all of Kenya into darkness.
Back in June 2016, the Gitaru hydroelectric power station, one of the country’s most vital, was disrupted when a mischievous vervet monkey somehow made its way inside and triggered a chain reaction that cut off power to the entire national grid. No, Karl Pilkington, it wasn’t working there, as far as one can tell from the reports at the time.
According to the Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen), the primate climbed onto the roof of the station and then fell onto a transformer. That misstep caused a technical fault: the transformer tripped, which then overloaded other equipment and resulted in a shutdown of more than 180 megawatts of capacity.
“This monkey tripped a transformer. This triggered a cascading effect on the other generators which ended up disrupting power generation and distribution in the whole country,” Kenya Power spokesman Eric Kathenya said.
The blackout persisted for around three to four hours before power was restored to 4.7 million households and businesses.
In an unexpected twist, the monkey survived the ordeal. After its brush with the national grid, the offender was handed over to the Kenya Wildlife Service.
KenGen was quick to defend its security measures, noting that “KenGen power installations are secured by electric fencing which keeps away marauding wild animals”.
However, the company acknowledged that in this case the barriers failed, and pledged to step up protection at its plants. “We regret this isolated incident and the company is looking at ways of further enhancing security at all our power plants,” it added.
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That’s monkey business for you.
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