Politics & Government

Animal Caused Substation Explosions

An animal that got into an electric substation on Tuesday afternoon caused explosions and a momentary service interruption.

An animal that crept into an electric substation near Danvers High School was the culprit behind some explosions on Tuesday afternoon.

An unknown animal got into the clearance area between equipment at about 2 p.m., said Coleen O'Brien-Pitts, director of Danvers Electric Light.

It caused two 10-second long blips in electric service to residents and businesses in the area, she said, but service was otherwise not interrupted.

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“The system did exactly what it was supposed to do,” she said, noting that new equipment installed about eight years ago detected a fault and tried again, twice, causing the brief interruptions. It was the fault that created the explosions, she said.

Those explosions, which came at about school dismissal time, attracted attention from people in the area and prompted the response of the Danvers Fire Department, who returned to the station just a few minutes after they arrived. WCVB-TV reported that a small fire was also spotted inside the substation.

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A decade ago, if the same animal got into the substation it could have caused a “sustained outage.” The animal was not identified.

Nobody was hurt in Tuesday’s incident.

The substation, at the southwest corner of the high school’s main parking lot, is one of three main distributing substations in Danvers.


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