Dominion: Friday night power outage caused by squirrel

Gone but not forgotten.

It was a bad weekend for power outages in the Richmond Highway area, with thousands of homes and businesses plunged into darkness on both Friday and Sunday evenings.

It turns out that the outage on Friday evening was caused by a squirrel getting into equipment at a local substation, a spokesman for Dominion Energy said Monday.

The rodent-caused outage occurred a little after 7 p.m. and affected neighborhoods from Huntington to Rose Hill. The timing was particularly bad since Friday, like Sunday, was an uncharacteristically warm and humid evening for this time of year.

Fortunately the power only stayed out for about an hour for most customers, although it did take closer to four hours for other customers to be fully restored.

This screenshot of Dominion Energy’s website on Friday shows the extent of that evening’s power outage.

Many of the same customers who lost power on Friday saw their lights go out again on Sunday evening after a car struck a utility pole on Richmond Highway. That outage took longer to fix because the pole needed to be completely replaced. More than a thousand customers were still without power after the sun came up Monday.

Squirrels are actually notorious for causing power outages, and are believed to be the most frequent cause of outages in the U.S.