Vail to Avon power outage was caused by a raccoon
A raccoon caused the power outage that beset the upper Eagle River Valley from East Avon to West Vail on April 10, a spokesperson from Holy Cross Energy has confirmed.
“A raccoon got on one of Xcel’s transformers,“ said Jenna Weatherred with Holy Cross. ”There was a fire and (the raccoon) did not survive.“
Power was out for more than an hour as a result of the incident; the outage started at about 8:55 p.m. Crews responded to the area of The Westin in Avon, shutting down traffic.
It’s not the first time a raccoon has caused a power outage in Eagle County.
During the same time of year in 2007, a raccoon caused a similar incident, also in the EagleVail area, also taking place in the late evening and lasting about 90 minutes.
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The raccoon crawled underneath a gate in Avon on March 26, 2007, and got into some electrical equipment which led to a loss of energy in a transformer at about 10:45 p.m. It was restored shortly after midnight.
In March of 2020, a similar incident occurred downvalley when a raccoon found his way into electrical equipment in a substation near Eagle.
