Squirrel kills the power
for 2 miles of G’ville
The electricity was off about 2 hours Sunday on most of the main peninsula of Guntersville, from the river bridge to Highway 79-South.
A squirrel did it, Electric Department manager Tommy Troup said.
“The squirrel got into a piece of equipment at our substation on Loveless Street and shorted it out,“ he said.
He said the department is installing some “squirrel guards“ to try to keep the little animals out of places where they can do damage. He said a high percentage of such power outages are caused by squirrels.
“We won’t eliminate 100 percent of the squirrel problem because there are so many little pieces of equipment in a substation,“ he said. “But we know we can do better and we’re going to work toward that.“
THE POWER went off about 3:30 Sunday afternoon and came back on about 5:30. The blacked-out area covered 2 miles of Gunter and Blount Avenues and the streets on either side of them, basically from Railroad Avenue to Rayburn Avenue.
Homes and businesses on the other side of the peninsula, the Browns Creek side, weren’t affected.
With the traffic lights out, police directed traffic at key intersections.
Restoring service took a little longer because the outage happened on the weekend. Crews had to be called in from home to replace the large insulator that was damaged by the short-circuit. A total of 7 men worked on the problem.
Mr. Troup said it seems to him that Guntersville has a bumper crop of squirrels this year, just from the number he sees on the streets and in yards around town.