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Monkey In Kenya Causes Entire Nation To Lose Power

By Patricia Ramirez
Published on: 18:48 PST, Jun 7, 2016

The entire country of Kenya in Africa lost power on Tuesday because of a rogue monkey. For real. The primate got into a transformer at the Gitaru hydroelectric power station; reportedly the little guy fell onto the transformer, and it resulted in the entire nation losing power. The offending monkey that terrorized Kenya has been identified as most likely being a Vervet monkey.

KenGen owns the facility, which produces 80 percent of Kenya’s energy, and the company said in a Facebook statement that by Tuesday evening all power had been restored to the east African country. After the monkey was retrieved from the transformer and minor repairs were made to the facility, all power generating units at the facility in Kenya were reportedly operating normally and at full function, reports CNN.

The power-interrupting monkey in Kenya reportedly made it through the incident pretty much unscathed. At the very least, the money survived its fall, and it was turned over to Kenya’s Wildlife Service following the time it spent monkeying around and disrupting power to the nation.

While the power was off for most of the day in most of Kenya as a result of the monkey in the transformer, for most of Kenya’s residents didn’t even notice the outage. This is because even though Kenya has one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, most of the country’s residents live in poverty and don’t have access to electricity in their homes.

The World Bank says that only 23 percent of Kenya’s residents actually have access to electricity in their daily lives.

Even so, almost a quarter of 45 million people had their electricity disrupted by a monkey.

As The Mirror UK reports, the offending monkey in Kenya had been climbing on the roof of the power station and fell through. When it dropped, the monkey tripped the electrical current in such a way that it disrupted power to the entire nation of Kenya.

Kenya is situated on Africa’s east coast, and the whole country lost power at about 11:30 a.m. local time, prompting KenGen to release a statement explaining the situation to the public. Unfortunately, they sent the message out using social media and electronic technology, neither of which people could use while Kenya was without power due to the actions of a curious and clumsy monkey.

All in all, Kenya’s monkey-related power outage lasted over three hours.

According to the power company in Kenya, KenGen locations are supposedly secured by electrified fences to keep away “marauding wild animals.” Apparently, in the instance of this widespread outage, the security measures were ineffective, and the company apologized for the security breach via monkey in its notice to its customers.

“We regret this isolated incident and the company is looking at ways of further enhancing security at all our power plants.”

Not surprisingly, social media has had a field day with the news that a lone monkey was able to wipe out the entire power grid in Kenya.

Ultimately, Kenya’s power was restored throughout the nation by about 3:00 p.m. local time on Tuesday, and that’s when the internet really started having fun with the situation.

Despite the fact that most of Kenya’s residential buildings lack electricity, the nation does boast an impressive service industry. Kenya’s service industry was effectively ground to a halt by the actions of the marauding monkey, a monkey that the Gitaru’s defenses were apparently ill-equipped to keep out.

Even though a lot of readers of this bizarre news story got a good chuckle out of the Kenya monkey cutting power to the country, the incident really does illustrate the vulnerability of the planet’s power grids, particularly those in developing nations. Even though workers were able to restore power to Kenya in just over three hours, the disruption caused by the meddlesome monkey undoubtedly cost the country millions of dollars in productivity.

[Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images]

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