City of Cody Power Outage Caused By Raccoon in a Transformer . . . Again!
Written by Andrew-Rossi on August 26, 2022
Despite the thunder and lightning, the outage that left many Cody residents without power last night was caused by a raccoon – for the fourth or fifth time in the past several years.
Cody experienced a power outage in the early hours of Friday, Aug. 26. The reason for the outage was not the lightning from the night’s weather forecast – it was a raccoon.
An employee with the Electric Division of the City of Cody‘s Public Works Department confirmed a raccoon got into a power substation owned and managed by Western Area Power Administration.
It sounds absurd, but it’s an issue the City of Cody has encountered several times.
In April 2021, a similar power outage was caused by a raccoon climbing into and “tripping out” a W.A.P.A. substation near Beck Lake. Dane Austin, Electric Superintendent of the City of Cody, said that this was “the third time it’s happened.”
This would be – at least – the fourth time a raccoon has caused a significant power outage in the City of Cody.
The plan was to improve the infrastructure surrounding the substation to keep animals out and away from any of the wirings for the electrical grids. But, if that infrastructure was ever put in place, it wasn’t enough to stop a determined trash panda.
As of 6 a.m., all power in the City of Cody has been restored. There is no word on the status of the guilty raccoon.
