2,500 in Bend lose power for hours; squirrel cited as cause

Nearly 2,500 Pacific Power customers on Bend’s Westside lost power for up to four hours Monday evening, and a utility official said repair crews found a familiar cause: a squirrel that got too close to some power equipment.

A posting on Pacific Power’s outage-page Website (https://www.pacificpower.net/ed/po/ooi.html) just after 5 p.m. said 2,470 customers were affected.

Repair crews got to work restoring power and said the last 1,000 or so got their service back just before 9 p.m..

Pacific Power spokesman Tom Gauntt said the cause was a squirrel.

It’s not the first time that’s happened in Bend, and is a common outage cause around the country. A squirrel met an untimely end at the utility’s substation near Mirror Pond in June 2014, knocking out power to a broad swath of the city for nearly two hours.