A large portion of Loganville was plunged into darkness on Monday evening – and there wasn’t even a storm in sight. This time it was another environmental hazard that caused the problem – a snake.
“A snake crawled into some equipment in a substation and caused a short circuit, knocking out the transmission line (the line that brings power to us from the generating plants),” said Greg Brooks, communications coordinator for Walton EMC.
Residents affected by the outage said it lasted about two hours. Brooks said customers from Walton EMC as well as Georgia Power were affected by the outage.
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“Because it was transmission (vs. distribution) equipment, it knocked out the line feeding both of our substations,” he said.
According to Wildlifeoutages.com, snakes are the second leading cause of substation outages, second only to birds. Snakes are great climbers and can get into very small openings.
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Brooks is looking into the size of the snake involved and whether it survived its encounter with the substation.
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