‘With the 16,000 volts she took, she should have come down as a charcoal briquette.’

Last August, a rummaging raccoon scaled a steel-and-barbed-wire fence at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, stumbled into a 16,500-volt switch and shorted the circuit in a burst of sparking electricity.

The laboratory in Pasadena was blacked out for 90 minutes as workers scrambled to get the space exploration facility on line.

Workers found the raccoon on the ground at the lab’s main electrical substation, charred, semiconscious and with much of its coat sheered off by its brief experience as an electrical component.

A Year of Treatment

“With the 16,000 volts she took, she should have come down as a charcoal briquette,” Pasadena Humane Society Officer Endel Jurman said.

After a year of medical treatment at an animal refuge in Little Tujunga Canyon, the raccoon has made a surprising recovery.

“One of our more gratifying successes,” said Martine Colette, director of the Wildlife Waystation, a nonprofit agency dedicated to caring for injured or abandoned wild animals.

The raccoon, nicknamed Voltage, has grown into a healthy 20-pound beast on a steady diet of dog food, mixed vegetables and an occasional rat.

The skin on its paws is still healing, but Colette said the animal stands a good chance of being returned to the wild in the next few months.

“Voltage has responded miraculously,” she said. “She was really fried.”

The raccoon’s run-in with the high-voltage switch occurred at 10:41 p.m. Aug. 30, when few workers were on duty. Only JPL, which does contract work for NASA, was blacked out.

Backup generators sustained most of the vital electronic equipment at the lab. Information from unmanned space probes was recovered from computer tapes at remote antennae sites. All in all, it was a relatively minor incident.

But the damage to Voltage was a tad more substantial.

She suffered first-degree burns to her nose and extremities. Colette figured it was a lost cause. But after weeks of treatment and a flow of antibiotics from an intravenous tube, Voltage regained her health.

She spent six months in the way station’s hospital and has since been put in an outdoor cage on the sprawling 160-acre facility.

Voltage now spends most of the day hiding in a steel drum near the top of the closet-sized cage and comes out at night to eat.

May Win Freedom

Her neighboring patients include a paralyzed hawk, a kangaroo with cataracts and three scruffy bears from Yosemite that Colette said would rip the doors off a Porsche for a doughnut.

“Trash bears,” she said, explaining that their taste for human garbage dooms them to captivity for life.

Voltage, however, remains a good candidate for parole because she has retained a fear of humans. Colette said that if Voltage is released, she will be returned to the San Gabriel Mountains, though nowhere near JPL.

The laboratory is taking no chances though. It has electrified the fence surrounding the substation and insulated the high-voltage switches to prevent future close encounters of the raccoon kind.