NORTHAMPTON — Much of the city lost power shortly before 2 p.m. Thursday after an animal interfered with a National Grid substation on West Street.
A spokeswoman for the utility said 5,200 residential and commercial customers were without power from 1:54 to 2:23 p.m. because of the critter.
“We learned of the outage and got crews out there quickly to work on the repair and we would just like to thank everyone for their patience,” Amie O’Hearn said. She could not identify what type of animal caused the disruption.
During the outage, police were called to direct traffic downtown and at the intersection of Westhampton and Florence roads. There were no accidents as a result of the outage, police said.
A similar incident occurred when a squirrel got into the same substation on West Street in October 2014, and again in October of last year. A bird’s nest also caused an outage in June at the substation.
Amanda Drane can be contacted at adrane@gazettenet.com.