Over 3,600 regain power after squirrel causes outage in the Miami Valley Sunday afternoon

A spokesperson for AES Ohio says power has been restored to those who were part of the Sunday afternoon outage that affected over 3,000 people in the Miami Valley.

Approximately 3,643 customers in the Miamisburg-Centerville area were without power for a portion on the day on Sunday after a squirrel got itself inside an “open space” left between power lines that are not supposed to touch, according to Rob Beeler.

Beeler told News Center 7′s Michael Gordon that parts of the company’s grid automatically shut down to protect the entire system and and stop the outage from becoming an even bigger problem.

“Our equipment is designed to  protect the grid and the gear used to deliver the energy so when the event occurred the crews got out there to investigate and found that so we have been working since that time to restore power to all our customers,” Beeler said.

Many homes and businesses, including the Dayton Mall, were affected by the outage. A mall employee told News Center 7 that at one point, only 40 percent of stores in the mall had power.

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