Birds Knock Out Power to Thousands

Eight birds knocked out power to five thousand people in the Minot area this morning. The birds...  More »

Eight birds knocked out power to five thousand people in the Minot area this morning. The birds flew in to a power substation north of Minot and started a chain of events that shut down power supplies to places like Dakota Square and several local radio stations. Bruce Carlson of Verendrye Electric Coop says the outage happened at 8:42 this morning. He says a majority of the customers who lost power had it back in 25 minutes or less. But a group of just under 200 customers living nearest to the substation were in the dark for three hours. (Bruce Carlson, Verendrye Electric) andamp;quot;Everybody's got the power back on. Unfortunately, it's not the normal feed but once the substation is completed we'll be able to get everybody back under their normal feed.andamp;quot; The outage forced Verendrye to call on partners at Central Power to send in workers to repair the damage. One of those workers showed us one of the lines that burned up in the outage. He says there were no witnesses, but it would have been like a lightning show to burn through cables like that. (Question: What do you find wher you come out in something like that? (Mark Sherman, Central Power)andamp;quot;We see eight dead birds on the ground and some considerable damage to the insulators and the insulating-type coverup that we have in the substation.andamp;quot; Bruce Carlson of Verendrye says the coop tries to keep birds away from substations with things like screeching sounds and fake owls posted near the lines. But, as you can see, when we were there, one bird sat just a few inches away from one of those owls and was not scared off. Carlson says the cost of repairs is unknown right now - he's just happy they were able to restore power to everyone fairly quickly.  « Less