Electricity outage in McMinnville

LISA HOBBS - News Editor

A mischievous squirrel caused a widespread power outage this morning at approximately 9 a.m.

“We get squirrels on transformers all the time, but this is the first time we’ve had one take out an entire substation,” said Neal Smith, Manager of Operations for McMinnville Electric Company. “I’ve been here 34 years, and we’ve never had that happen before. This squirrel burned up a breaker at our substation. It got on top of a breaker, and it shorted it out. When the substation breaker burned, that caused the majority of the problem.”

The squirrel suffered death by misadventure at Newtown’s substation.

“He came from somewhere, but we just don’t know where. There are no trees or anything around it. It’s a pretty old substation. We are trying to build a new one. We can’t do upgrades until the new one is built.”

Smith said ‘how many customers were affected’ and ‘for how long they were without service’ are questions not easily answered.

“It took out the entire substation, but we got most of it back on in 30 minutes. It took us about an hour to restore the remainder. We had two breakers out and it took about an hour, I think, to get everyone back on.”

Pictured is the bakery area at Walmart. Customers weren’t entirely left in the dark, as auxiliary power kicked on and illuminated some areas. A few cash registers went offline, but a handful remained useable.