Power outages affect midtown

Published 9:28 am Wednesday, September 14, 2016

More than 100 Entergy customers were without power Tuesday morning due to an unwanted visitor: a squirrel.

The squirrel got a little too close to an insulator on a power line, Entergy spokesperson Shelia McKinnis said.

The outage left 141 customers without power for about 45 minutes, she said. Power was restored at 10:50 a.m.

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She said the insulator automatically “locks out” as a safety precaution when something tampers with it.

“It could have been anything. It’s a safety mechanism to shut off the power because you don’t know what’s on the line,” McKinnis said.

The outage affected customers along North Frontage Road and parts of Halls Ferry Road and Gregory Lane, she said.

At the same time, Entergy workers were repairing a pole along Halls Ferry Road, closing it between Confederate Avenue and Division Street and rerouting traffic, in a scheduled outage necessitated by a pole being hit by a car weeks ago.

“It’s a totally separate outage,” McKinnis said. The outage affected no customers, she added, and the pole replacement was completed at 2:25 p.m., she said.

“They were able to isolate the pole without having any customers affected,” she said.