“For the safety of both the animal and our crews, Xcel Energy is not able to respond to remove animals from power poles or other electrical equipment. When animals are frightened, rescues can unfortunately lead to injury to the animal or to the people attempting to help. Additionally, our equipment carries a risk of electrical contact, even when it may not appear energized. Because of these safety risks, we cannot shut off power for rescue attempts,” Xcel said on social media.
Translation: “Cat might scratch our dude, or we might get sued if we accidentally hurt it during rescue. Additionally, though we 100% have to have the ability to shut down that strip for maintenance, if we totally didn’t do that and went up there anyway it would be dangerous which is why we do shut it off during maintenance. Because of the safety risks involved with literally breaking maintenance protocol which is 100% optional, we could just shut it down like we do for maintenance for ten fucking minutes and grab the cat with a cherry picker, but fuck your cat.”
When I was about 11 I had a cat I loved dearly get stuck in a massive cottonwood tree over my house for 5 days, it was agonizing listening to him cry every day.
My parents were cold and heartless about it and joked that there would be a “cat skeleton tree” in our yard.
I tried everything, finally got an older sibling to help throw a fishing line up and pull up a bucket with wet food. It didn’t make it quite to his limb, but eventually the smell drove him to climb towards it, and from there I was able to coax him down. He was covered in ants and dehydrated but he was fine.
A couple weeks later he ran up a pine tree and got stuck for 4 days again. This time I fashioned a pole and just knocked him off the branch. He fell about 20 feet into a pile of leaves and pine needles and was fine.
A couple weeks later he ran up a pine tree and got stuck for 4 days again. This time I fashioned a pole and just knocked him off the branch. He fell about 20 feet into a pile of leaves and pine needles and was fine.
I wasn’t 11 but as a young man, newly purchased home owner and father I was struck by an epiphany that I was able to get a cat after years of never ending moving and renting.
So I went out and got the greatest cat I could ever find. A grey and white tuxedo.
Well within a month this idiot had climbed a Norfolk pine tree. A good 20 plus feet, right to the fricken top.
For 6 hours he meowed and meowed. My daughter meowed and begged for me to get him. Now I was by no means a tree climber but I wasn’t gonna leave em and he clearly couldn’t work out how to get down.
So up that tree, sap, pine needles, webs, all in my fucking mouth, I climbed until I got to the top and grabbed that idiot. It was fucking terrify (I hate heights). I shoved him in my hoodie and somehow got down.
Thus he became forever known as stupid cat.
That said he wasn’t that stupid that he ever repeated it. Never went higher then the first branch of a tree again.
That’s a great story, I appreciate your sharing.
I want our species to be judged by how far out of our way we go to help those who have no impact on our own lives, and how much we value even the smallest lives and the connection between us and other species even.
Respectfully, fuck your parents. I’m glad you were there for that cat.
He was my only friend for many years, living in isolated areas and being kept out of school I didn’t have much else besides shitty parents and siblings that just wanted to get high, the whole idea of people being heartless towards innocent beings in need of aid makes my blood run cold and the back of my neck feel hot with anger.
The cat was rescued! Xcel refused to help. Someone in the community finally found a big enough ladder, climbed up to live wires and rescued the cat. Thankfully everyone is safe.
Freaking hero… respect
Lemmy, looking at an old wooden pole with splinters and hanging wires and old ceramic insulators: “LET THE CAT DIE, THAT THING IS POWERING THE ENTIRE WESTERN SEABOARD, RUSSIA WILL TAKE ADVANTAGE AND INVADE, MILLIONS WILL DIE.”
I hate you all and hope your non-existent girlfriends leave you one day for being heartless and mechanical.
Ahem… not what they said…
Has anyone considered that turning off the power might not even be possible without turning it off at hospitals and other critical locations…?
I guess by not turning it off they risked people being electrocuted and possibly result to a brownout within the area, seeing how eventually resulted to bystanders attempting to rescue the cat and a bad PR.
Personally I think it’s just a lapse in risk analysis on the electric company.
I would be astonished if that janky, raggedy wooden pole connects to anything but neighborhood housing.
Say what you mean: “I do not care what is true because what I want to happen is way more important”.
Just adding that these operations are federally regulated to remain in operation. They likely don’t even have the choice if they can’t justify the liability.
Careful, a bunch of downvotes and nasty comments probably are coming your way despite there being a good reason for such regulations.
Lol, I was an electrical product investigator/inspector for 15 years. I’ve dabbled in being a pariah of sorts. But thanks for the heads up! A level head is a balm these days.
all critical locations have huge DC batteries specifically design to take over during a short outage. Then generators.
There would always be a risk any backup systems fail. As another commenter pointed out, in other countries it would be illegal to cut power like that for that kind of reason. And that’s a good thing. Power is literally keeping people alive and shouldn’t be turned off because it seems mean to leave it on.
But a better point is, no one discussing this knows what downstream effects could happen if they killed the power. Seems kind of crazy to me to pretend we do.
A backup system that isn’t tested regularly is not a backup at all, just the illusion of one.
If you can’t turn the power off with 24h notice then nature will turn it off with zero notice at the most inconvenient moment.
They should indeed do regular tests of their backups. They should also ensure technical staff is on-site during those tests.
I do not follow the logic of people being so blinded by their love of cats that they literally think they can become electrical grid engineers and know all the risks, just because they want to know them.
It does not matter if every single vulnerable building has backups and tested them yesterday (obviously none of that could ever be close to true), it’s still a non-zero risk to human lives, for one cat.
They reroute and turn off sections of wiring all the damn time for maintenance, they have crews out in the field who are literally going around, turning some lines off after turning others on, and doing routine work on lines, transformers and other components. It’s not life and death, it’s just a company being cheap and lazy.
If having a love for life and wanting better outcomes and hope and inspiration for innocent life baffles your sense of logic, then maybe your sense of logic is flawed and holding you back from emotional growth.
It’s amazing because electrical grids are designed to be able to have sections shut down at any time. The intended purpose is literally to prevent a catastrophic shutdown.
Imagine pompously stating that your suggestion is somehow more logical on the basis of 1) there’s a good likelihood you aren’t an electrical engineer and 2) that there’s some kind of genuine risk here (because apparently this guy thinks the whole lynchpin to the fucking grid happens to be this exact pole).
Dunning Kruger, at its finest. Glad to see you still have your head on straight.
No no, I’m sure that old wooden pole with the ceramic donut insulator, splinters and dangling wires is powering like fucking NORAD or something. 🙄
No really, thank you. There is a segment of people who think themselves “progressive” in spaces like Lemmy but are utterly heartless and exist like soulless automations when it comes to the stuff that actually matters in our lives like protecting the innocent and making sacrifices for small things that make someone or something else have a better experience in life, even if the risk “outweighs” the reward. It’s denying the human experience to make that kind of calculation.
Imagine how much better our world would be if everyone, everywhere stopped what they were doing to help someone or something innocent in need. We wouldn’t have the fucking Epstein files right now. It actually makes my blood boil and I deleted a few comments here before moderating my tone to be more civil.
Sure go ahead and assume I want the cat to die. Which I didn’t. What the fuck.
The cat was rescued apparently anyway.
You’re digging yourself into a hole that seems oblivious to normal human feelings and getting irate at the responses. This is all you baby.
The cat isn’t part of the equation, I gave no opinion on that. The risk of never testing your failure response is much higher than the risk of testing your failure response.
If a test happens to save a cat? Lucky cat. If not, they’ll still have to test it at some other point anyway.
I never remotely commented that backup systems shouldn’t be tested. Bizarre.
No you’re just trying to suggest that a test can’t be pushed up because you hate cats.
Unless you genuinely just do not understand what they mean, which is likely.
If their back up system fails then it’s their fault for not keeping it up to date. Seriously, my husband is an engineer who designs these battery systems. They do not “fail” if they are maintained and replaced properly.
Patently absurd. Technology often fails regardless of what you do. Inviting that failure would be negligence and should be illegal.
The one thing I know for sure about any engineer is that we are intimately familiar with the concept of things failing when it’s least convenient.
We’ve got the Lemmy/Reddit worldview out in force. We should shut down vital infrastructure, risking life safety of many, for a cat. I say this loving cats: that’s silly.
Yeah, I knew when I commented it might get some backlash, but the strength of it is somewhat depressing. Isn’t Lemmy supposed to be mostly rational intelligent people?
I guess it just tells us how commonplace it is for people to declare a risk either worth it or non-existent without a fucking clue about the actual risk they are talking about.
In any case, thank you for demonstrating that there are still some sane people left out there.
Isn’t Lemmy supposed to be mostly rational intelligent people?
Are you fucking insane.
Omg wasn’t this story on reddit a few days ago? Something is off here. Why would the cat simply stay there for 5 days? No cat would just sit there for that long - hunger usually gets the better of them and they risk jumping even if afraid at first. Also why haven’t people done anything about that cat in the days since this was posted on reddit? If that cat really is stuck don’t wait for the fkn electric company, get a fkn ladder and get the cat. Or get a blanket under the pole and prod the cat until it jumps. No one has been doing anything about that cat for 5 days, wtf?? None of this makes any sense
I believe that might have been a different cat on reddit. I believe that one was up there for three days and it was updated they were rescued after the third. But I drink a lot so I’m not sure.
Have you not read the article? People tried, ladders don’t reach, firefighters need Xcel to turn off power.
Edit: Kitty was saved!
Maybe it’s weird that the cat didn’t try jumping down but this situation is not that rare. I’ve seen a workplace where a cat was stuck in one of those semi-floors between windows and when asked the employees were like, oh yeah, she’s been there a few days.
Aww would be a shame if a pole a few blocks up just ‘failed’ for some reason. :/ The cat could co-incidentally be free to climb down or be rescued during the totally unexpected outage!
If the newspaper article doesn’t get them to do it, then this is the way.
“Leave me alone!”- le cat.
(Don’t think xcell actually needs to turn the power off, but they do need to send a technician in a bucket.)
TIL technicians come in buckets.
(I thought they came in cans)
Most cats can survive terminal velocity. That cat isn’t stuck.
Most cats don’t know that though
It wouldn’t have been up there for 5 days if it wasn’t
Fuck Xcel Energy.
Then again, if they can get the cat out whithout cutting off power, it might save a whole district from power loss. And depending on the duration/location, your neighbouring industries like steel mills would be very much unhappy to have theire steel go solid inside their pipes and have to replace all of them…
That power line fed some houses. It’s an old wooden residential line, they also usually have redundancy because these things have to be serviced all the time.
It’s crazy how many people in here are like “FUCK LIFE UTILITIES ARE MORE IMPORTANT” no wonder we’re in an age of heartlessness where people don’t care about harm to innocents.
Holup now,
That’s not what i said, first of all, i’m not familiar with what i assume is american infrastructure, so i assumed worst case scenario and went with it being some important bit for them to refuse it being turned off.
Second, i didn’t say “fuck that cat he shouldn’t have gone up ther in the first place”, i said:
if they can get that cat out without cutting power it might save a whole district from power loss
Which is a whole nother thought.
I understand your reaction to this poor cat being stuck up here, and i could also have assumed that if it has been going for 4 days, they might not be able to save the cat without the power grid operator doing something, which is a relevant argument which i maybe should’ve taken into account
But you simply can’t go around telling people they are sociopath when they just propose we take the (at the time) seemingly more practical route.
Looking at the power line on the picture: HAHA no.
As much as I like cats. I can also see/share your point. Here in NL a company is legally not allowed to cut power for ‘saving a cat’ reason, and will be heavily fined for it.
