Residents on the 3000 block of Halibut Point Road briefly lost power on Saturday morning (7-10-17). Homeowners quickly reported the problem to police and the Electrical Department was notified.
Electric Department director Bryan Bertacchi is unsure of the cause.
“On Saturday at 9:43 AM, we had what’s called a re-closure operation that affected the 3000 block on HPR. We don’t know what caused the fault, usually these kinds of fault are in a storm. It’s usually a tree blowing on the line, but in this particular instance it could’ve been a bird strike. But we couldn’t verify that,” he said.
Although linemen were unable to find any concrete evidence of what caused the outage, several residents reported seeing a bird hit a nearby transformer.
Only a short stretch of Halibut Point Road was affected.
According to Bertacchi, it’s not very common to have outages like this one anymore because the Electric Department has been taking special precautions.
“We’ve been doing a lot of tree trimming on the island and working hard to coordinate our systems, so instead of the whole town going black in an instance like this, it’s just a small number of customers that have to suffer though the outage. And we try and quickly repair that,” Bertacchi said.
Power was restored to the area that same day.
