Downtown Edmonds power outage due to squirrel in equipment

About 1,700 Snohomish County PUD customers were without power for about an hour Monday morning in downtown Edmonds.

Edmonds police posted to social media Monday about the outage just before 9 a.m., advising drivers to treat non-working traffic lights as four-way stops.

As for the cause, “Unfortunately, sounds like a squirrel got tangled up in some equipment in our Edmonds substation in downtown,” PUD spokesperson Aaron Swaney said.

As we reported last year, according to this Nature Conservancy article, wildlife comes in second only to stormy weather as the major cause of power failures. And squirrels are by far the worst offenders. In fact, some industry estimates say squirrels cause almost half of all power outages from wildlife.