A Furry Friend Was Responsible For Bangor Power Outage

If you were wondering why the power suddenly went out Wednesday, we have the answer.

Much like the annoying gopher in the classic movie, "Caddyshack", another critter wreaked havoc in the city of Bangor the other day, but he didn't tear up a golf course. much to the annoyance of Bill Murray, this particular animal managed to knock out power for a good half hour.

Wednesday night, a rather curious squirrel managed to gum up the works at a Versant power substation, around dinner time, effectively locking about 7,200 customers out of electricity. If you were driving, you obviously noticed that traffic lights were out as well, which can be a scary thing, given the number of cars on the road at that time of day.

Scrolling on Facebook around that time, I probably saw about 25 posts of people wondering what was going on. At first, I thought it was mainly on the East Side of Bangor, but it turns out that affected a big chunk of town, And since the weather was fine, people were wondering what was up with the outage.

Turns out, the peak times of the year for squirrel attacks are from May to June, and October to November. Squirrels cause problems by tunneling, chewing through electrical insulation, or becoming a current path between electrical conductors. It is a problem that seems to be a thorn in the side of many electric companies throughout the United States.