Thousands in Rogue Valley lost power Wednesday after squirrel short-circuited breakers

By Morgan Rothborne, Ashland.news

A Wednesday morning power outage affecting customers from Medford, Talent and Ashland was caused by a single squirrel, said city of Ashland Electric Department Director Thomas McBartlett. 

The squirrel gained access to the inside of the North Mountain Avenue substation, climbed onto the top of a distribution breaker and made contact with exposed components. The result was “like when you slap two wires together,” McBartlett said. 

The chain reaction was quickly stopped when the system detected the problem and a nearby breaker connected to the transmission opened, stopping the continuation of the short circuit through the rest of the system, he said. 

Previous reporting by Ashland.news included the estimated range of the outage available at the time which included Northern California. Cooper Whitman, regional manager at Pacific Power stated Thursday the outage included 14,000 customers in Medford, Talent and Phoenix. Due to Ashland’s independence, its roughly 12,800 affected meters can’t be included in the Pacific Power numbers, McBartlett said. 

Squirrels are the number-one wildlife cause of power outages in the country, he said. Power companies are continuously attempting to protect systems from wildlife. 

“We put all kinds of things all over everything. Wildlife protection, or mitigation it’s called. … Once in a while, they find a vulnerability and get in,” he said. 

Staff in the field sometimes call these measures “squirrel guards,” due to the propensity of that particular rodent to cause problems. 

Asked how the squirrel paid for its enterprising curiosity, McBartlett responded with a bluntness that betrayed familiarity: “Oh it’s barbecued. You can barely tell it’s a squirrel.”

The incident was an example of the city’s effective system redundancies, McBartlett said. It took staff around an hour to get into the affected area and transfer the power load to a backup breaker ready and wired up inside the station. A spare breaker will be transferred from city storage Thursday and wired into the system to replace the back-up breaker now in use. 

Some parts of Ashland saw power restored within a little over half an hour while the central part of the city — Southern Oregon University, the Railroad District and nearby areas —  had to wait closer to an hour. The delay was connected to those served by the substation where the squirrel infiltrated. The areas served by the city’s other two substations were easier to put back online, McBartlett said. 

The city of Ashland’s electric system’s complexity contributed to the wide range of the power outage as customers in Medford and Talent were affected. The city purchases power from the Bonneville Power Administration in the federal marketplace but the power is transmitted over Pacific Power lines, while the city maintains and controls the substations, McBartlett said. 

Despite the relative ease of restoring power for Ashland with spare parts at the ready, wildfires have changed the way Pacific Power manages its electric utilities  — one small disturbance can have far reaching effects. 

“With elevated wildfire risks across the state, some of our equipment are placed on enhanced safety settings and, when there is a fault detected, the lines de-energize within fractions of a second. … A visual inspection and any needed repair work must be done before power can be safely restored,” said Pampi Chowdhury, a communications specialist with Pacific Power. 

Customers can expect potentially more outages due to these sensitive settings and the time associated with inspecting systems before turning them back on, Chowdhury wrote in an email Thursday. 

Due to Ashland’s compact size, McBartlett said the city’s electric system is not being continuously set to such a high level of sensitivity. Instead, Ashland Fire & Rescue Chief Ralph Sartain, Emergency Management Coordinator Kelly Burns and McBartlett work together to determine when red flag days or other conditions merit altering system sensitivity, he said. 

The city has also been steadily investing more in making its electric grid resilient to wildfire such as trying new fuses, replaying old equipment and more extensively managing vegetation near power lines, McBartlett said. 

Keeping the city’s systems safe from wildfire or other threats is part of an overall effort at the Ashland electric department, he said. 

“Safety and reliability are the two words you’ll hear most at our meetings. … It’s something that we take time to maintain and take pride in,” he said. 

Email Ashland.news reporter Morgan Rothborne at [email protected].