Local power outage caused by birds
A local hospital lost power this past week for a short amount of time because of a bird, and neighboring San Diego County reported a similar issue, but their outage was caused by a squirrel.
News 11’s Nico Payne spoke to officials with the Imperial Irrigation District to find out if this is a common problem.
On Tuesday Pioneers Memorial Healthcare District along with the whole block in a nearby neighborhood lost power.
“Only for a few seconds we were out of power, we had the emergency generators immediately kick in. Unfortunately we never could get to the problem or find out what exactly had happened until we had IID officials, the emergency team and had some other people trouble shoot what exactly was happening,” said Frank Salazar, Director of Communications for PMHD.
When IID came out, they were able to find the culprit.
“When IID came back they said it was an avian activity, a bird. So exactly, at the end of the day this happened because it was bird activity throughout the power lines,” explained Salazar.
“Bird contact by in large is fairly common throughout utilities everywhere. So this just happened to happen on a line where we serve a lot of customers,” said Robert Schettler, Communications Specialist for Imperial Irrigation District.
Though not a very common problem in the Imperial Valley the IID does try to prevent nature from causing power outages.
“A diversion device that we have that we put on some of our lines. That will try to; we try to encourage the birds to go elsewhere. A bird can basically put its two feet on a line and it’s fine. It’s a problem if the bird stretches its wing out and it hits something else that’s energized,” explained Schettler.
The IID also wants to make the public aware of other issues that are more common than power outages because of Mother Nature.
“If you have a Mylar balloon, those you know, graduations, birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries, whatever. They’re nice and they’re pretty but don’t release them into the air, you got to keep them out of the atmosphere. You’d be surprised how many outages we have sometimes throughout the utility industry, not just IID, but throughout the industry that are caused by Mylar balloons,” added Schettler.
