Cause unknown for south central power outage

More than 1,400 Oshawa residents found themselves without power on Monday morning as the lights went out before the lunch hour and stayed dark for nearly an hour.

The outage affected houses and businesses in a wide swath on both sides of Highway 401, stretching from Athol Street to Wentworth Street and from Park Road to Ritson Road.

According to Ivano Labricciosa, the vice-president of engineering and operations with the Oshawa Power and Utilities Corporation (OPUC), the cause of the outage is still unknown.

After searching for the problem and without any reports of downed hydro poles or accidents, Labricciosa says the cause could be a number of things.

“It’s actually intermittent things, so right now there’s no cause for us to go back out and do a deep patrol. I think at this stage, we’re just going to call it unknown at this point and leave it at that,” he says. “Sometimes just birds or animals, squirrels or things like that tend to get across the line and causes it to flash over.”

Labricciosa also said such an outage could be caused by a failing device on the power line. However, he said nothing had been found at that point.

In 2014, the OPUC reported that nearly 40 per cent of lengthier power outages were being caused by squirrels.