Around 33,000 people in Northeast Portland were left without power for a short time on Wednesday after a beaver chewed through a tree near the Columbia Slough, causing the tree to fall on a transmission line, Pacific Power said.
The electricity provider first reported the outage, which mostly affected the Woodlawn and Concordia neighborhoods, around 4 p.m.
A beaver sending a tree into a power line isn’t as typical as one might think for the Beaver State.
“Animal interference is relatively common,” Pacific Power spokesperson Simon Gutierrez told The Oregonian/OregonLive, but he said this was the first time since he had been working at the company that a beaver had damaged one of its lines.
The utility employs protective fencing and webbing to keep squirrels and birds out of electricity substations, but those barriers don’t exist around every transmission line. They also don’t necessarily apply to beavers working away at a tree, Gutierrez said.
A similar incident occurred in 2021, when a beaver felled a tree near Multnomah Falls that hit a power line that didn’t belong to Pacific Power. The resulting sparks started a brush fire that burned two acres and was put out within two hours.
Pacific Power, which provides electricity for only a small slice of Portland residents, takes precautions to reduce the risk of these kinds of incidents causing wildfires, said Gutierrez. Its equipment senses when a fire risk is present, because of damage or for other reasons, and quickly lowers the energy running through lines.
Though the tree fell in a relatively remote area, Gutierrez said solving the issue was simple. The transmission line’s conductor remained undamaged, so crews were able to quickly return the line to working order.
By 5:30 pm, officials confirmed that all power had been restored to the area.
More important still, Gutierrez confirmed that “the beaver was okay.”
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