Monkey Knocks Out Sri Lanka's Entire Electrical Grid During Heatwave
As much as humans have excelled at conquering our surroundings—from pushing oceans back from seaside communities with walls and pumps to air conditioning homes in arid environments—there is ultimately no getting in the way of Mother Nature’s will. Occasionally it finds ways to remind us of that fact.
Case in point: Over the weekend, a monkey in the island nation of Sri Lanka reportedly decided to remind the public who roamed those lands first, cutting off power for the 22 million-person country with one single blow. The nationwide blackout came as temperatures in the country reached 90° Fahrenheit.
According to The Guardian, the nation’s Energy Minister believes the entire country lost power after a monkey came into contact with a grid transformer. Engineers worked quickly to restore power to critical facilities like hospitals, but many households remained without electricity overnight.
How it is possible that one isolated disturbance could have shut down the electric grid across an entire nation is unclear. It seems that an imbalance in power caused cascading problems across the grid. An unnamed engineer speaking to the Daily Mirror was quoted as saying, “The national power grid is in such a weakened state that frequent island-wide power outages may be expected if there is a disturbance in one of our lines.”
Not to pick solely on Sri Lanka, here in the United States, experts have warned that electrical grids are woefully out of date and unprepared for a surge in new demand from AI data centers and chargers for electric cars. Blackouts and harmful electrical surges that can destroy appliances are becoming much more common as grids experience more dramatic fluctuations in demand that they were not designed to accommodate. Engineers designing grids decades ago did not envision thousands of people all plugging in their giant SUVs every night to charge.
There is a hope that nuclear energy could help increase energy supplies, but those projects will take years to develop and the rest of the grid will still need to be upgraded to support greater transmission. President Trump recently suggested that new data centers should be co-located next to power plants so that they do not need to tap into outdated power lines.
Sri Lanka is home to a large population as much of the country was historically blanketed in forest. Deforestation has occurred rapidly in recent decades as the country has grown in population. In essence, humans are encroaching on the monkey’s territory, and in that light, the outage can viewed as some sort of karmic justice. Monkeys are known to terrorize towns across Sri Lanka, raiding them for food and destroying crops.
But hey, the monkeys were there first. Some would argue it is the humans harming the apes, not the other way around.