Friday, March 29, 2024

Squirrel to blame for Flower Mound power outage

Never underestimate the power that one small squirrel has – in this case, the power to disrupt service for more than an hour to 1,400 customers in Flower Mound.

At about 10:30 a.m. Thursday, a circuit lost power at the McKamy Substation in Flower Mound. When a CoServ Electric crew arrived to investigate and repair, they discovered an underground conduit line had been chewed.

The No. 3 cause for CoServ Electric service disruptions is small animals, and to the veteran crew at this particular crime scene, the evidence pointed to a squirrel as the culprit.

The chewed line was about the only evidence at the scene; the squirrel did not survive the 15,000-volt charge.

And this is not an isolated incident – in the Dallas-Fort Worth area or nationwide. Squirrels have been known to cause outages for thousands of customers at a time, including Wednesday’s disruption in California’s Marin County that affected 24,000 people.

CoServ installs equipment to help prevent such POCBS (Power Outages Caused By Squirrels) but is not entirely successful, as Thursday’s incident showed.

The crew restored service to all Flower Mound customers by 11:30 a.m.

 

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