Osprey responsible for power outage in parts of central, western P.E.I.
As of 10:00 p.m. Tuesday, power was restored to all Maritime Electric customers
Maritime Electric says an osprey is responsible for knocking out power to 27,000 customers Tuesday evening.
As of 10:00 p.m. Tuesday, electricity had been restored, and the utility posted on social media that the outage in large portions of P.E.I.'s Prince and Queens counties was caused when an osprey made "contact with a transmission line in the Sherbrooke Substation."
"The system responded as intended to prevent additional damage," said the utility in its post on X.
According to Maritime Electric's outage map, areas affected spanned from as far west as North Cape to the Charlottetown area, with some scattered outages also reported in Kings County.
The city of Summerside, which operates its own electric utility, said in a social media post just before 9 p.m. that the entire city and some surrounding areas were also experiencing an outage.
"Our team has identified that the current power outage affecting Summerside and surrounding areas is a result of a failure at the Maritime Electric Sherbrooke Substation. We are deploying our generators to critical locations within our city to temporarily re-energize some areas," reads the post.
An update by the city at 9:45 p.m. said it had restored power to many of those affected.
A failure at the Sherbrooke substation, located just north of Summerside, led to significant power challenges back in February. As a result, residents were asked to conserve electricity and a mobile transformer had to be brought in from Newfoundland to stabilize the system.
Summerside Electric generates about 60 per cent of its electricity through renewable sources like solar and wind, but it still relies on Maritime Electric's transmission grid for power that the smaller utility purchases from New Brunswick.