PORT ANGELES — A brief power outage affecting about 44 city light customers Thursday morning was caused by sea gull excrement, city officials said.
At about 8:10 a.m., “a sea gull incident” caused a transformer to short-circuit and trip a line fuse, George Drake, city line operations manager, said Thursday afternoon.
Witnesses said the incident sounded like a gunshot.
“Normally in a situation like that, we just lose that transformer and four or five customers, but in this situation, it took the line fuse, which took 44 customers out for that period of time,” Drake said.
Power was restored by about 9 a.m., he said.
The outage was inside a perimeter outlined by 14th and 15th streets from I Street, west to about where L Street would be, Drake said.
Such incidents are not common so far away from the shoreline, Drake said.
“We see it downtown, but not so much” farther away, he said.
“Usually it is an actual bird or an animal” that gets stuck in the lines and causes an outage, he said.
When the lineman arrived on scene, he was greeted by a sea gull sitting atop the pole, Drake said, “so it looks like it is a hangout for them, and eventually [the excrement] will track over the top of the insulator” and cause a short circuit.
“It is cumulative,” he said. There was “quite a bit” of excrement on the transformer.
Crews did not replace the transformer Thursday but plan to do so in the near future, Drake said.
“We found out that it is an older pole . . . This morning . . . we upgraded some things and will provide some maintenance later on.”
For now “it is good to go,” he said. “Customers are in good shape now.”
Work crews also installed a bird guard, which “covers the insulator so these sorts of things don’t happen,” Drake said.
“It is a rubber cover that prevents any contact” with the insulator.
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Reporter Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.