By PAM WIGHT Special to the Daily Press
An electrocuted squirrel caused wide-spread power outages in Santa Monica Thursday.
The furry critter apparently stumbled into Southern California Edison’s sub-station in Santa Monica at 10:12 a.m., which caused the power to be out six hours in some places, said Edison spokesman Paul Klein. Thursday’s outage affected 3,025 Santa Monica residents before it was corrected. Eighteen residents were still without power at 5 p.m., Klein said.
The area affected extended from the Santa Monica Pier at Colorado Avenue, east to Rose Avenue, and north from Lincoln Boulevard to an unknown area, Klein said.
The Santa Monica Courthouse avoided any security problems by evacuating the building, said court clerk Ted McDonald. It was almost closing time when the outage occurred, so it did not have a huge effect, he said.
Power is sent via transformers from the power plant at very high voltages. The sub-stations reduce the voltage for customer use. The squirrel somehow got into the building and was electrocuted on the live wires.
“We occasionally get power outages from rodents getting into the equipment,” Klein said.
And on Wednesday, Santa Monicans also went without power — this time from an underground circuit problem. The outage, which affected 3,000 people, occurred from 3:54 p.m. to 5 p.m.
At Santa Monica High School, only teachers and administrators were in the building when the power went off for a couple of hours on Wednesday, said Sue Drescler, assistant to principal Ilene Straus.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 15, 2004. Read the original PDF.