My dad sent me this story in an email and it's a depressing story, but it also illustrates what kind of damage that Beavers can do. If you haven't never seen their work/destruction, it's amazing how big the trees are that they can take down.
From the Williams Northern Light:
On June 4th North Star Electric co-op received calls that some members south of Baudette were out of power.
Linemen responded but were unable to easily identify the outrage cause. The beavers had been living up to their stereotype , and the linemen needed to patrol
three miles of line through flooded swamp.
Linemen Tim Pelach set out in his hip-waders to patrol the line from the north. The rest of the crew drove the 18 miles around the swamp to the other side to their
work on the three-mile stretch of line from the south.
Tim waded through waist-high water several times as he passed beaver dams, and it was he who came across tow poles leaning severely toward the grade due to flooded conditions.
The wire that would have been energized before the outage was just 2& 1/2 feet from the grade.
Confidence from finding the cause of the outage quickly turned to a bit of alarm when saw a large bear. The minute or two of determining if it was alive or dead was tense.
Linemen experience a wide range of situations and levels of danger, but this was a first. What they found was not only one dead bear, but also an estimated four deer, seven
wolves, and another five bears—all had apparently been electrocuted.
North Star Electric Co-op contacted the DNR to report the incident.
