Cause of overnight power outage unknown

By Heidi · November 2nd, 2009 · 2 Comments

Seattle City Light is looking into the cause of a power outage that affected thousands of residents in Fremont and Ballard overnight. We received several messages via email and in the forum indicating that power went out around midnight. Power was restored within an hour and a half. The problem appears to have occurred at the Canal Substation but details are unclear for now. Workers are at the substation today to determine what happened.

2 responses so far ↓

1 Mike Eagan // Nov 2, 2009 at 3:36 pm

Don't think there's much left of it, but apparently a rat created an arc in a very bad spot in the Canal Substation, enough to knock out a connector called a “bus” that subsequently caused five separate feeder lines (main power lines that go out into the neighborhood) to shut down automatically - kind of like a circuit breaker. There are lots of outages caused by birds spreading their wings on utility poles and contacting two sides of a circuit, but this sounds like a pretty unusual last act by that rat.
2 Mike Eagan // Nov 2, 2009 at 5:36 pm

Don't think there's much left of it, but apparently a rat created an arc in a very bad spot in the Canal Substation, enough to knock out a connector called a “bus” that subsequently caused five separate feeder lines (main power lines that go out into the neighborhood) to shut down automatically - kind of like a circuit breaker. There are lots of outages caused by birds spreading their wings on utility poles and contacting two sides of a circuit, but this sounds like a pretty unusual last act by that rat.