Bird Poop Is The Culprit In Friday Power Outage In Eugene

KLCC | By Rachael McDonald

Published May 9, 2018 at 2:16 PM PDT

The power outage that put KLCC off the air for about 10 minutes last Friday was caused by a bird.

To be precise, a bird pooped on a piece of equipment near the Willamette Substation that serves downtown and the University of Oregon. That would not have caused an outage normally but according to an EWEB spokesman, there was a substation down for maintenance so the power was off for about 6 – 8 minutes.

The bird pooped on an insulator. This is the actual insulator which still has remnants of the excrement on it.

The outage Friday affected downtown Eugene and the U of O.

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Disasters & Accidents EWEB

Rachael McDonald

Rachael McDonald is KLCC’s host for All Things Considered on weekday afternoons. She also is the editor of the KLCC Extra, the daily digital newspaper. Rachael has a BA in English from the University of Oregon. She started out in public radio as a newsroom volunteer at KLCC in 2000.

See stories by Rachael McDonald