(Seguin) — Pesky critters and power lines don’t mix. For the second time in the span of three days, a large portion of the city of Seguin went dark. City officials say a raccoon is again to blame.
Public Information Officer Jennifer Sourdellia says a second raccoon struck the Seguin East substation Monday night, but this time, hit a different transformer. Much like the results on Saturday night, a significant portion of the city went dark. Soudellia says LCRA and city electric crews responded quickly to the outage and managed to restore the service to most customers in about an hour on Monday night.
“We suspect that a raccoon climbed onto a high voltage wire and touched something that was grounded and that resulted in the outage. Fast forward to Monday at about 8:30 p.m., we had another power outage and come to find out it was another raccoon incident. (It) got into our substation and onto a transformer and they did essentially the same exact thing. So, again that resulted in a power outage from around 8:30 p.m. to about 9:20 p.m. We had power restored within about an hour on Monday and then on Saturday, it was a little bit longer. We had power restored in about an hour and a half according to our electric utilities director,” said Sourdellia.
Soudellia says these kinds of things happen from time to time. She says what makes this so unusual is that both incidents happened within just a day of each other.
“Although, it is a little bit rare, it does happen. It does happen in other communities. It just hasn’t really normally happened here in Seguin very often and it’s just kind of ironic that it happened in two different incidents very close together in the same timeframe which is really unusual,” said Sourdellia.
The power outages were the talk of social media for the last few days. Sourdellia says about half of the city’s customers were without power on Saturday evening, but the number wasn’t as high for Monday’s outage.
“On Saturday evening, we had approximately 14,500 customers that were impacted and then we had about 2,200 customers impacted on Monday,” said Sourdellia.
Sourdellia says the city is working together with LCRA to try to see if there’s more that needs to be done to try to prevent these kinds of things from happening.
“We have been getting a lot of questions about what if this happens again? Do you have anything in the plans to prevent this or if it happens again, what are you going to do? We can tell you that the city is working with LCRA. LCRA is the owner of that substation but we are working with them to find a solution to this issue. But, we do want everyone to know that if something like this occurs especially in an emergency situation, we do have a plan in place and that allows us to use circuits from a totally different substation to restore power to our customers in a timely manner so we can get everyone’s lights back on,” said Sourdellia.
The raccoon-caused power outages led to a number of memes and humorous posts about raccoons and the damage that they had caused in the city. Even the Seguin Police Department joined the fun, by posting a satirical press release and photo that identified “Ricky Raccoon” as the subject responsible for Monday’s outage.