Bird knocks out power to 10,000 CEC members

Nearly 10,000 Central Electric Cooperative members in the Bend-Alfalfa area lost power for up to three hours Saturday morning after a bird flew into some transmission lines, officials said.

The outage began just before 6 a.m. and Central Electric crews, assisted by Pacific Power, patrolled the lines to find what had caused a transmission line circuit breaker to flip, affecting four CEC substations.

Service was restored to more than half the affected accounts after Pacific Power crews determined a bird flew between the two phases of power lines, causing the breaker to flip along main transmission lines feeding the area.

The other 4,817 customers had power restored by about 9 a.m. after CEC crews reset five circuit breakers at the Knott Pit substation, according to the utility’s outage center updates page.

Co-op spokeswoman Courtney Cobb said the bird didn’t survive the encounter.

CEC thanked its members for their patience and Pacific Power crews for their help patrolling the lines.

On June 25, a bird flew into Pacific Power’s downtown Bend substation and sparked a 2 1/2-houwer outage that affected more than 5,200 customers downtown and on the Westside of the city.

Back on May 1, Pacific Power officials say an outage that affected nearly 11,000 customers in Bend was caused by a hawk who was killed in the encounter.

Birds are responsible for nearly a quarter of power outages in the U.S., officials say, while squirrels cause many as well.