When I was a traffic signal & lighting tech, the squirrels would chew in a perfect circle around the thermoplastic top of the photoelectric cell for the street light, open 'em up like someone had used an old fashioned can opener leaving the 'lid' sticking up. The rain would come in, mess up the circuitry after a time and we'd get a call for the street light day-burning. At least the PEC would fail with the light on, as the circuit is designed to power the lamp ON with the normally closed contacts of the relay.
Their gopher cousins would burrow into any electrical pull box in the ground that did not have the bottom grouted and gnaw the traffic signal wiring. I pulled dozens of their electrocuted carcasses out of pull boxes and repaired the damage.
Over 5 years ago a gray squirrel chewed the ACSR (aluminum conductor steel reinforced) messenger on the overhead electrical service drop (which is also the neutral for a 120/240 volt, split-phase, 3-wire residence) going to my mom-in-laws house. Nothing in the house that ran on 120VAC would work, only the 240VAC water heater, clothes dryer and stove would work, as they don't need a neutral to operate.
The little devil gnawed through the metal like it was candy, only the 2 black hot legs supported the drop....makes my teeth hurt thinking about it.
Apparently there's no driven rod beneath the house or anywhere near the panel for the meter and circuit breakers that's tied to the entering service neutral (the house was built in 1911). When that overhead drop was chewed, her 120VAC devices got their return to the utility via the cable TV box that had a ground for the cable coax collars/shields, those shields being grounded also further up the line at similar boxes on her neighbors' houses. I discovered this when I was troubleshooting her flickering lights prior to them going out completely and then discovering the chewed service neutral. You can see where the heat melted the insulation on the green "ground" wire and the coax collar due to the loose connection which caused much heat at the point of voltage drop. That little green wire, which ran from the panel to the grounding lug in the cable TV box, supplied the return to the utility company source via the cable TV shield for the entire house's 120 volt items when the squirrel chewed the overhead drop's neutral/messenger conductor (mouthful!). Of course, it didn't help matters either that the house doesn't appear to have a driven ground rod near the panel that was tied in to the panel. That would have provided most of the return instead of that little #14 green wire.
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You absolutely should mod alert shills!
