Squirrel blamed for morning power outage in SW Topeka
Published: Oct. 23, 2019 at 9:32 AM CDT
Evergy says a squirrel is what caused a large part of SW Topeka to go dark Wednesday morning.
At the peak of the outage the Evergy outage map showed 4,000 without power from 10th and Wanamaker to 17th and Gage. Also from 17th and Wanamaker to 29th and Fairlawn.
Fire crews were dispatched to a fire at the substation at 17th and Fairlawn, around 9:15a.m. That’s where they found the squirrel in the inner workings of the electrical equipment. It did not survive.
Power was fully restored by 10:15a.m.
Police directed traffic at the major intersections where stop lights were not working. They told drivers that approached a stop light that was not working to treat it as a 4-way stop.
