FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Iguanas are skilled saboteurs when it comes to the electric grid, a power outage in Lake Worth Beach revealed.
A large green iguana ended up on a transformer at the city’s Sixth Avenue substation on Wednesday morning, causing over 1,400 customers in the area east of Dixie Highway and south of Lake Avenue to lose power for about 35 minutes, the time it took for a team from the city, which provides its own utilities, to arrive on scene with safety equipment and extricate the reptile before starting the system up again.
The iguana died.
“Nothing is going to survive that situation,” said Ben Kerr, a spokesperson for the city of Lake Worth Beach who lives a block away from the affected area. “The pictures are horrible every time this happens.”
It happens frequently. So much so that the city has instituted several “hardening” measures to protect critical infrastructure from iguanas, such as making utility poles more difficult to climb.
Iguanas are very adept climbers, Kerr said, one of many reasons they present a unique danger to the grid, as opposed to, say, a bird or a squirrel. The things that would deter a squirrel from climbing don’t deter an iguana, he said.
They are also so big that they can touch two lines at once, which is what caused yesterday’s outage, and so heavy that when they die, they have to be manually removed because “the system can’t blast them off,” Kerr said. “If it was a bird or small animal, the system would carry on serving power; you wouldn’t even know what happened.”
The System Hardening Reliability Improvement Project measures are only a quarter of the way done, but they are making a difference: the city has had only three iguana-caused power outages this year, a 60% decrease compared to 2021.
“We’re not just reducing the likelihood it happens, but the amount of time the power’s out,” Kerr said.
Throughout his time as city spokesperson, he has never seen anyone take issue with the fact that the iguanas themselves are dying.
“We do everything we can to stop the iguanas,” Kerr said. “Not because we love the iguanas. It’s a danger. We have to go into a very dangerous place to remove the iguana. We don’t want to encourage iguanas to zap themselves.”
Online, many residents expressed amusement over yesterday’s outage, while others fumed, frustrated with the city and its utilities. On a post in a local Facebook group about the incident, a few commenters even suggested that the city was lying about the iguana to cover up its own failure to keep the power on.
“BS!!! If this were true, the power would go out every damn day,” wrote one commenter.
Another came to the city’s defense.
“Thanks Lake Worth Utility; you’ve not just been listening in Commission Utility meetings but now also getting out early with an explanation of the outage. Does help quell the hysteria although there will always be some. Thanks for the upgrades too,” the commenter wrote.
Lisa Poskanzer, a media specialist who lives in Lake Worth Beach, didn’t blame the utilities, but felt that the city should do more to tackle the iguana problem in general.
They swim in her pool, eat the flowers off her plants, and scare her dogs and small children. The other day, her dog trapped one under a pool floatie and didn’t kill it because “she’s a pacifist like I am,” Poskanzer said.
But the iguana situation has gotten her to a violent place.
“I’m telling you, had I known then that my neighbor had a gun, because I didn’t know, had I known he had a gun, I would’ve gone and gotten him and shot the thing,” she said.
Poskanzer did not lose power on Wednesday, but she lives a little over a mile from the area that did. Over the 18 years she has lived in her Lake Worth Beach home, her power has gone out from time to time, but she doesn’t usually find out why.
“I don’t care because I feel fortunate that I get electricity and I don’t want to beat up the people who bring it to me every day,” Poskanzer said.
However, she added, “I really want the city to do something about the iguanas.”
