The power outage Wednesday that affected more than 10,000 Dominion Energy customers in Virginia Beach had one casualty — the squirrel that triggered it.

The critter that got into a power substation did in fact die, but a Dominion spokesperson said the company’s safeguards prevented a wider impact to the power grid.

Dominion’s standard equipment is built to keep wildlife safe if they venture near, but isn’t able to prevent all instances of animal interference, according to Bonita Harris, a Dominion spokesperson. Harris said their safeguards stopped a “catastrophic failure and widespread damages.”

“The substation worked exactly as it was designed when a fault is detected to protect the integrity of our network,” she said. “The lockout occurred to isolate damage from cascading.”

Squirrels are the animal kingdom’s biggest threat to the power grid, Harris added, but they don’t cause as many problems as car accidents, weather and tree-related disruptions.

The tree-loving rodents have been driving energy providers nuts since electrical lines first began stitching together the world. In 1987, a squirrel shut down the NASDAQ stock exchange for 82 minutes, and another one shut down trading for about an hour in 1994.

Animals are considered a significant threat to electrical infrastructure. One cybersecurity expert tracked outages caused by animals from 2013 to 2017 and found that animals including squirrels, birds, rats and snakes caused 1,700 outages that affected more than five million people.

Utility companies install wheels, cages and other measures to protect their equipment from animals, and animals from the equipment, according to the American Public Power Association. Animals cause outages by coming into contact with a bare wire that leads from the high-voltage line to the transformer.

If the transformer has the right amount of electrical grounding, there will be a short, causing the animal to be electrocuted and a power outage, according to Unitil, which provides power in Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Dominion’s crews restored power to those affected Wednesday in an hour and nine minutes by rerouting the electrical feed to an alternate source of power to keep the lights on while working on permanent repairs, according to Harris.

Gavin Stone, gavin.stone@virginiamedia.com

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