An owl caused the outage on Jan. 2 that knocked out power to a quarter of the city of Penticton.
The bird flew into the Huth Avenue substation, one of four that distribute power to the city, where it hit the overhead bus work and died.
“Power was out from 12:11 a.m. until about 12:45 there were 5,451 customers without power,” said Shawn Filice, the manager of Penticton’s electrical utility. “
The area of the large outage stretched to Wade Street at the north, Government Street at the east, the city limits at the west, and south to Brandon Ave.
The City of Penticton has roughly 19,000 customers covered by the city’s four substations.
READ MORE: Late night power outage puts Penticton in the dark
Despite the quick recovery of the main outage, during the restoration workers discovered one of the connections was “hot”, which required an additional two hours of repair work before power could be fully restored.
Around 500 homes were affected by the secondary outage.
As the weather warms up and the city moves into spring, be aware that there may be more animal-caused outages.
“I don’t know why starlings in particular,” said Filice. “But you’ll see in the spring some random outages and it’s most often starlings.”
The upside of animal-caused outages is that unlike mechanical failures, restoring power can be done more quickly.
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