Thousands in Lodi lose power after bird lands on breaker

Nearly 4,000 Lodi Electric Utility customers — including schools and local businesses — briefly lost power on Tuesday morning when a bird landed on a breaker, causing an outage at the Henning Substation located near the intersection of Ham and Kettleman lanes.

The power went out at 9:05 a.m. and was fully restored at 9:36 a.m. The outage spanned from Lower Sacramento Road east to Hutchins Street, and from Lodi Avenue south to Harney Lane.

“We were able to reconfigure the substation breakers and get the power back on pretty quickly considering the extent of it,” Lodi Electric Utility Director Liz Kirkley said. “We heard quite a loud explosion out here at the electric utility because it was right outside our offices.”

While the outage covered a large portion of Lodi, only about four small areas were actually affected, said Adam Brucker, Lodi’s business development manager.

Areas around Larson Elementary and Tokay and Lodi high schools were affected. So were a number of local businesses, including the Chase Bank, Starbucks and Big 5 stores on Lower Sacramento Road and Kettleman Lane.

“Definitely there was a pretty diverse mix of customers that were affected by the outage,” Brucker said. “There’s obviously a lot of retail and commercial development in that area. There are schools within that area along with tons of doctors’ offices and senior living facilities.”

Fire Station 3 was also affected by the outage, Lodi Fire Chief Larry Rooney said. However, they were able to restore power with emergency generators.

Firefighters also monitored their radio frequencies to make sure they didn’t miss any calls during the outage.

It’s not often that birds cause power outages in the city, Kirkley said.

“It was a random bird. It’s not like it’s something that happens a lot. It just so happened that a bird landed there on one of our substation breakers and took it out,” she said.

More of the utility’s electrical issues come from encounters with other animals.

“We have outages caused by a lot of different animals — squirrels, rats, and one time we even had a fox,” she said.

“It depends on the season. Squirrels tend to be the most frequent fliers.”

Tokay High School was one of the customers that briefly lost power during Tuesday’s outage.

When an outage occurs the school assesses the situation, taking into consideration how long the power is expected to be out, the day and time the outage occurs, the weather conditions and other factors before determining what action to take, Tokay High Principal Erik Sandstrom said.

Tuesday’s outage happened during second period,

and the school was informed the power would be restored quickly, he said.

With reasonable lighting and moderate temperatures, the decision was made to keep the students in their classrooms, Sandstrom said.

In one case Sandstrom recalled from about 12 years ago, a blown transformer at the high school knocked out power in the morning on a day expected to exceed 100 degrees. In that situation, the school decided to go ahead and send students home.

CoCo’s Bakery on Kettleman Lane also lost power Tuesday morning. When the power went out, employees immediately cut off all the

gas and turned off all the electronics so when the power came back on, they didn’t have a big surge causing major damage, manager Holly Foletta said.

The outage forced Coco’s employees to shut down all the grills and turn away at least four tables of customers.

“It’s impacted businesses significantly,” Brucker said. “It affects all businesses in different ways. We don’t have any manufacturers on this side of town, but if it were them, it would’ve significantly affected them — especially our plastic manufacturers. If their molds get set up with plastic that cools unexpectedly.”