A squirrel behaving badly caused a world of trouble Wednesday morning when it got into a Met-Ed substation behind the Wawa located at the intersection of Route 422 and Lorane Road in Exeter Township.
“This outage began at 9:15 a.m. and it impacted close to 2,400 customers in the Exeter area,” said Todd Myers, a FirstEnergy spokesman.
The Giant Supermarket at 4655 Perkiomen Ave. (Business Route 422) was among the businesses affected. Customers reported periods of problems with the check out systems during and following the outage.
“The substation had a squirrel that came in and it got on the metal bus work — the steel stuff that almost looks like a jungle gym — that’s actually the conductor inside a substation,” Myers said. “That leads to breakers and all other sorts of equipment.
“We actually have something called an animal guard on there and that’s like a rubber and plastic compound that is wrapped around the bus work,” Myers said. “So if that squirrel had just contacted the bus work, it would have insulated the squirrel.
“Instead, this squirrel decided it had to chew on it. It gnawed through that insulation/animal guard and then it came into contact and it created a hole in that bus work.”
The hole in the steel created by the surge of power still needs to be fixed, but a temporary workaround is in place.
“Within five minutes we had close to 1,200 of those customers restored,” he said, explaining they were restored by remote-controlled switches.
The switches can reroute power around a certain problem area using other lines.
“This is what they are talking about when they say the ‘smart grid’,” Myers explained.
The remaining customers had service restored by 10:35 a.m., he said, when crews went out and manually switched power lines around the issue.
Myers said he did not have any numbers on storm-related outages Wednesday night into early Thursday. Some outages were reported in Centre and Ontelaunee townships.
“There was a cold front that came through and we were ready for that,” Myers said. “We had people deployed, ready to go out for it.”
FirstEnergy serves 148,266 customers in Berks through its Met-Ed subsidiary.
