Squirrels behind recent power outages in Bountiful

BOUNTIFUL – Some neighborhoods in Bountiful have been experiencing short power outages since last Friday. Bountiful City Power says they’re being caused by a fluffy nuisance — squirrels.

The outages have lasted from a few seconds to a few minutes.

“For whatever reason, there just seems to be more squirrels in the area,” said Allen Johnson, Bountiful City Power department director. “The squirrels are climbing up and getting contact with the insulators or the fuses … and they’re shorting it out.”

Johnson said they found nearly a dozen squirrels on or around two specific poles, causing the outages.

“Over the weekend, on the same one pole, three squirrels [were found] and a total of five on that other pole,” Johnson said.

Bountiful City Power and other officials are working to protect the poles and put in other safeguards to prevent the problem. However, the squirrels are persistent.

“We put on bird guards and squirrel guards … But where we put this insulated protection, they’ve chewed through it,” Johnson explained.

Additionally, he said they recently put a slick solution on the pole that has helped slightly. But overall, there’s only so much they can do to prevent the squirrels from reaching their new electric acorns.

“We can’t control the squirrel population and why there’s so many I have no idea,” Johnson said.

Overall, the city is aware of the problem and will continue working to keep the electricity flowing.

“We don’t like to have outages, we don’t like to be interrupted … But we’ve been trying to do our best to trim trees, maintain and replace equipment,” Johnson said. “We’ve run out to other substations to put more protection to try and avoid this same phenomenon. But I can’t stop them when they get up there and chew back through the protection.”