A squirrel interfering with electrical equipment temporarily knocked out power for 15 customers near the Governor’s Mansion, an Alaska Electric Light and Power spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
“It happens. They sometimes get where they shouldn’t be,” said Debbie Driscoll, AEL&P’s vice president of consumer affairs in a phone interview. “He basically caused a problem with the fuses.”<\/p>\n
AEL&P has closed its lobby, but is maintaining full operations as many other businesses close down to help slow the outbreak of COVID-19. <\/p>\n
AEL&P will maintain full service through the outbreak, Discoll said.<\/p>\n
“Our crews were on site very quickly, and found it not alive,” Driscoll said. “He-she-it actually caused a fair amount of damage.”<\/p>\n
Driscoll says the issue of wildlife causing electrical failures is rare but not unheard of. <\/p>\n
Squirrels are a larger issue down south, while birds are a larger problem in Juneau. This is the second incident this year, the first being caused by some manner of bird.<\/p>\n
“Outages in general are not particularly common for us, we have a fairly reliable system,” Driscoll said.<\/p>\n
• Contact reporter Michael S. Lockett at 757.621.1197 or mlockett@juneauempire.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Power was quickly restored, the squirrel was not. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":534,"featured_media":59383,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[75,717,150],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-59382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","tag-local-news","tag-power-outages","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59382"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=59382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}